A few kids may have been late for school Friday morning as they waited for the tug Molly M I to tow the disabled freighter through the Bart Starr Memorial (Walnut Street) Bridge in downtown Green Bay.
At sunrise on Friday, Sept. 23, the S.T. Crapo was pulled from her slip with the help of Green Bay-based tugs Washington and Texas.
With it’s rudder welded in place, the S.T. Crapo is guided out of the mouth of the Fox River and into the bay for its open water trip through the Great Lakes to be recycled at the Marine Recycling Corp. in Port Colborne, Ontario, at the far northeast end of Lake Erie near Niagara Falls. Photos by Chuck Zentmeyer
With Lafarge Holcim expanding its on-land storage facilities, the S.T. Crapo was purchased by Marine Recycling Corp., which will recycle all of the metal from the ship.
For the past 25 years, the S.T. Crapo has been docked at the LaFargeHolcim terminal on the Fox River and used as a cement storage vessel.
Launched nearly a century ago, on July 7. 1927, as a self-unloading cement carrier, the S.T. Crapo carried primarily cement from Alpena, Mich. By the mid-1990s, it was the last coal-fired freighter on the Great Lakes. In 1995, her boilers were converted to oil-firing by Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay. Except for one trip to Alpena in 2005, the 403-foot ship has not left the Port of Green Bay.