North Star Port

DULUTHPORT.COM | 7 PHOTOS / University of Wisconsin-Superior Jim Dan Hill Library Archives Stretching 251 feet long and 43.5 feet across, the single-screw steamer was built as a tight fit for the narrow canals that linked Great Lakes ports to tide- water before construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. All of Duluth hoped she would sail longer than her ill-fated predecessor. No one held that hope tighter than Sena Nielsen Sabourin, 23, whose husband, 34-year-old Joseph Francis Sabourin, was the only Duluthian among the ship's officers. Into the fray Fit-out came quickly for Lake Traverse, with her maiden voyage scheduled almost immediately. She waited just long enough for three U.S. Navy radio opera- tors to arrive from New York and join the crew. Armed with a three-inch gun aft and loaded with more than 1,900 tons of general cargo—food, equipment and supplies for the American Expeditionary Forces—Lake Traverse weighed anchor and departed Duluth on May 5, 1918. Two days later, she passed through the Soo Locks and continued downbound through Detroit on May 9. After clearing a Canadian port May 15, Lake Traverse soon faced the Atlantic Ocean, and below those mighty waves, the ever-present threat of German submarines. Sena waited anxiously for an update. It came July 7, a Western Union cablegram dispatched from an unnamed French port and delivered to their Pitt Street bungalow in Lakeside. "Arrived safely." – First Mate Joseph F. Sabourin. A sturdy survivor Lake Traverse spent the season sailing between England and France to supply the war effort. On Oct. 19, 1918, she was officially commissioned USS Lake Tra- verse at Cardiff, Wales, and assigned to the Naval Overseas Transportation Ser- vices. Armistice Day brought a cease- fire on Nov. 11, ending hostilities. By mid-December, 11 McDougall-Duluth ships plied European waters in military service, two littered the ocean floor as torpedoed wreckage, and seven more were under construction. After the guns quieted, Lake Traverse carried coal from Wales to various French ports until her reassignment to the U. S. Food Administration in March 1919. Sailing as a relief ship, she carried foodstuffs and grain between French ports, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) for transshipment to hungry populations in France, Belgium and Central Europe, i n c l u d i n g t h e n e w l y i n d e p e n d e n t Polish state. Lake Traverse continued sailing for the U.S. Shipping Board until 1925, when she returned home to the Great Lakes and Chicago-based Union Transit Company. Three years earlier, with the emergency shipbuilding pro- gram halted and contracts canceled, McDougall sold his shipyard to Julius H. Barnes. In 1936, the Nicholson Transit Com- pany purchased Lake Traverse and converted her into a crane vessel at Ecorse, Michigan. The ship remained on the Great Lakes until 1941, when new owners returned her to the ocean and she tramped through World War II. She spent her final years carrying cargo throughout the Caribbean. On July 6, 1955, the vessel sank near Tortuga Island, Haiti—a Duluth-built ship that outlived both world wars and went to the depths hauling cement from Puerto Rico. The Lake Traverse launched from Duluth in 1918, destined for danger on the Atlantic Ocean.

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