SS Meteor, Last Whaleback

At Barkers Island in Superior, the SS Meteor floats as the sole surviving whaleback freighter in the world. Scottish captain Alexander McDougall invented the whaleback in the eighteen eighties, a radical hull design with rounded, pig-snout bow and a low curved deck that let waves wash right over, keeping the cargo dry and the ship fast. The American Steel Barge Company and others built forty-four whalebacks, most of them in Superior, between eighteen eighty-seven and eighteen ninety-eight; Meteor was number thirty-six, launched in eighteen ninety-six originally as Frank Rockefeller.

For the next seventy-three years the ship hauled iron ore, oil, grain, and automobiles across the Great Lakes. When whalebacks became obsolete, Meteor was nearly scrapped, but maritime preservationists bought her in nineteen seventy-one and returned her to Superior. Today she is a National Register museum ship where visitors can walk the distinctive curved hull and learn how the Great Lakes once teemed with these strange, submarine-shaped freighters.