Card, Souvenir

Card bearing a colorized image of the GREATER DETROIT--depicted as painted white--docked on the recto and information about the vessel on the verso:

37. Greater Detroit
Built Lorain, Ohio, 1924 Length, 519 ft. 7,739 tons
The largest passenger steamers of the Great Lakes, and the largest sidewheel vessels ever built (apart from the ocean liner GREAT EASTERN) were the GREATER DETROIT and GREATER BUFFALO of the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Co. So huge were they that the GREATER BUFFALO was converted to a wartime aircraft carrier, the USS SABLE, to train naval aviators on the GREAT LAKES. Like most large sidewheelers built after 1890, they had inclined engines and relatively small feathering paddlewheels. This explains why the GREATER DETROIT's picture two usual features of the 19th century steamboat silhouette: the walking beam and high, rounded paddleboxes. After 1945 the GREATER DETROIT ran another five years on the Detroit-Buffalo route and also served as a giant cruise liner. She was permanently laid up in 1950, and scrapped a half-dozen years later. -Edward O. Clark