The ship’s story begins in 1882, when Canadian Pacific placed its first order to Scottish shipbuilders. At the time, there was no transcontinental railway and no national highway system. Ships were a vital link between southern Ontario and the Canadian West.

In 1907, the CPR decided to move its Georgian Bay terminus from Owen Sound to the new village of Port McNicoll. Hopes for Port McNicoll were high: this was to be the Chicago of the North. The liner would travel through Lake Huron and Lake Superior to the western terminus at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, the site of the former fur trade post of Fort William (now Thunder Bay).

In 1907, the CPR commissioned Fairfield Shipbuilding on Scotland’s River Clyde to build Keewatin and her sister, SS Assiniboia. For the Great Lakes, Keewatin was a big ship: 102 metres long, with a beam of 13.3 metres and a draft of seven metres. Indeed, she had to be cut in half at Lévis, Que., in order to fit through the small canals on the St. Lawrence River and the Welland Canal.

The Globe in Toronto marvelled at the two new ships. “No such vessels have ever been seen on the Great Lakes, but their excellence lies not in the gorgeousness of their furniture or the gingerbread work of decoration and equipment, but in their superiority over all other lake craft in model, construction and equipment, and in their thorough adaptability for the business in which they will engage.”

By the 1920s, the ships were crowded with tourists instead of the immigrants who’d been the CPR ships’ first passengers. Ticket prices went up, service improved and the decade was the most profitable for the railway’s fleet.

At the time, there was a gap in the trans-Canada highway system in the same part of the Lake Superior region that had tested the skill of railway builders in the 1880s. Keewatin bridged that gap by carrying travellers’ cars, allowing them to travel from the Atlantic coast to the Rockies in their own automobiles.

Ticketholders travelled in style. Westbound, the luxury started at Toronto’s Union Station, the beginning of a three-hour trip from Toronto to Port McNicoll, where bellboys waited to carry luggage to the ship. Keewatin had a crew of 90 sailors, porters, cooks and housekeepers to serve about 280 passengers. Tourists slept in one of the 104 staterooms furnished in mahogany and brass.

This was not a trip for people in a hurry: Keewatin’s cruising speed was just 26 kilometres an hour. But luxury made up for the lack of speed. Keewatin’s indoor lounge was two decks high, filled with fresh flowers and potted plants, and covered by a stained-glass skylight. The food was first-rate, and at night passengers danced to live music on a polished oak floor, watched movies or chatted over cocktails. Passengers who wanted to sit on deck and enjoy the view were served hot bouillon by teenaged bellboys who worked on the boats on their summer holidays.

At night, when the bar was closed, these helpful young men would secretly sell passengers small bottles of whisky and, breaking company rules, dance on deck in the dark with passengers their age to the echoing music from the ship’s band. By day, if the weather was decent, passengers played shuffleboard and quoits (a popular ring-toss game) on the upper deck or could use the ship’s swing.

This genteel world was extinguished by air travel and the completion of the Lake Superior section of the Trans-Canada Highway in 1960. Keewatin carried its last passengers in 1965. It was sold to a Michigan restaurant company that kept it docked in the Kalamazoo River, where it stayed until 2012, when it went home to Port McNicoll to become a museum.

Last summer, the ship was refurbished and towed to Kingston’s Marine Museum of the Great Lakes. It has been a long, circuitous journey, but Keewatin has escaped the fate of the rest of the 3,600 Clyde-built ships of her time (except for two in Australia, they’ve all been scrapped or lie on the bottom of the sea). It’s set to open as an exhibition in May, and feet will once again tap on polished floors as visitors cross the gangplank into a different era.