Prominent in Michigan’s port of Ludington harbor sits the SS Badger — the last of Lake Michigan’s car ferries and the last coal-fired passenger steamship in the United States.

The 410-foot ship weighing 6,650 tons was built in 1953 and designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2016.

The ship provides a 4-hour-long transport across Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan, to Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

“The Badger is the last of the Ludington car ferries,” said Eric Harmsen, site manager of the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum, “which was this huge industry here in Ludington and a large part of Ludington’s maritime history and heritage, and Lake Michigan maritime history.”

Harmsen said during the 1920s, early 1930s, Ludington hosted the largest car ferry fleet in the world.

“The Badger is the last of that legacy. It’s a connection to Ludington’s maritime past,” he added.

Two years after the 1873 incorporation of the city of Ludington, the Pere Marquette Railroad arrived and added cross-lake steamer service between Ludington and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, using small wooden-hulled ships known as “breakbulk” freighters. The vessels transported cargo across the lake to Wisconsin, where dockworkers unloaded the cargo onto trains.

“Pretty quickly they realized that that was a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process, and by the late 1800s, they were experiencing quite a few delays,” Harmsen said.

A Captain James Martin in Ludington, who worked for the railroad, saw that elsewhere in the country and around the world there were boats called car ferries designed to carry loaded train cars, according to Harmsen. Those boats were open-ended barges that train cars were put onto, crossing rivers and shallow bodies of water.

Harmsen said a wooden car ferry in Frankfort, operated by the Ann Arbor Railroad, had a major impact on Martin’s vision for Ludington’s transport service.

“Captain Martin saw that boat and some of the other car ferries around the country and thought that that design could be improved on,” said Harmsen. “So he got together with a naval architect named Robert Logan and together they created the design for the first steel open-water car ferry on the Great Lakes.”

In 1897, the steel-hulled Pere Marquette entered service, which was equipped with four sets of railroad tracks on deck to transport loaded rail cars. By mid-1900, the Pere Marquette Railway Company entered 10 additional ferry ships.

The SS Badger and its twin, the SS Spartan, were built in 1953. The Spartan rests in Port Ludington, while the Badger remains in service.