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9. Ship of the Month - cont'd. By the time she entered Welland Ship Canal for the festivities on Saturday, August 6th, 1932, she was festooned with bunting all over, and so were the banks of the canal, with huge crowds of spectators following LEMOYNE as she made her downbound passage. The largest crowds, however, were on hand at Lock 6, Thorold, where the official ceremony took place and LEMOYNE snapped a ribbon amid "a riotous medley of noise and cheers". It was reported that "speeches by leaders of the (British) Empire heralded the consummation of 20 years of brilliant engineering effort". Those leaders were available because the canal opening was timed to coincide with the Em­ pire Conference, which then was being held at Ottawa. The delegates went by special trains from Ottawa to Niagara Falls, and after sightseeing there and at Queenston, they were taken by electric cars of the Niagara, St. Catha­ rines and Toronto Railway to Thorold. Leading the delegation was a vice­ regal party headed by His Excellency, the Rt. Hon. Earl of Bessborough, Governor-General of Canada. Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett also was in attendance, along with Mr. Henry, the Premier of Ontario; Dr. Manion, the Dominion Minister of Railways and Canals; the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin, and the Rt. Hon. J. H. Thomas. The Ontario Provincial Police and a delegation from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police "in mufti" (ordinary dress rather than full regalia) made certain that the proceedings "were carried out with­ out trouble". LEMOYNE took her record grain cargo all the way to Kingston, where it was unloaded and then shipped eastward in canallers. LEMOYNE was again dressed in bunting for her arrival at the Kingston elevator, as she was the largest ship ever to call there at that point in time. It would be another 27 years before upper lakers would be able to take their grain cargoes all the way down to Montreal via the new St. Lawrence canals opened in 1959, but LEMOYNE survived to see that day, remaining a vital member of the fleet of Canada Steamship Lines. After the opening of the Seaway, C. S. L. decided to update LEMOYNE in order to make her more economical to operate. Over the winter of 1960-1961, while she was in winter quarters at Collingwood, the steamer's original four boi­ lers were removed. They were replaced with two watertube boilers, but the sources immediately available to us do not show their dimensions or the name of their manufacturer. The new boilers were oil fired, so no longer would LEMOYNE produce the billowing clouds of coal smoke which she was known to emit when she was a coal-burner. During the course of the reboilering, a new and much shorter smokestack was fitted, with two pipes protruding from its top. This may have modernized the ship's appearance somewhat, but in our es­ timation, it did not improve it. LEMOYNE remained in service for eight more seasons, but Canada Steamship Lines was commissioning more and more newly-built, Seaway-sized bulk car­ riers, and one by one the older steamers in the fleet were weeded out and sent off to the breakers. LEMOYNE was a good ship with her 70-foot beam, but she was not as deep of hold as were newer vessels and, of course, although she had seemed immense back in her early years, she now was some 100 feet shorter than the maximum Seaway lakers of the day. The end of the line finally came for LEMOYNE during the summer of 1968. Your Editor saw her pass downbound light at the Soo on August 26th, 1968, and at the Huron Cut the following day. Her hull was looking very shabby indeed, her sides streaked with rust and with dust from from all sorts of cargoes. We had heard that she was heading for lay-up at Kingston, and we feared the worst, as that was not a normal lay-up port for such a large ship, particularly at mid-season. As it turned out, that trip marked the end of LEMOYNE's active career, although during October she was loaded with a winter storage cargo of grain, which she held at the C. S. L. elevator at Kingston (Portsmouth).