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168 Telescope Bay. On 21 June 1905 her name was changed to U.S.S. WOLVERINE, the nickname of the state whose name she had borne, as the Navy had authorized construction of the new battleship MICHIGAN and her sistership, the SOUTH CAROLINA. In 1913* the centennial of Perry's victory was commemorated with great festivities around the Great Lakes, and the hull of his flagship, the brig NIAGARA, was raised and reconstructed. In the summer months of that year, the WOLVERINE escorted the brig NIAGARA on a tour of the large cities of the Lakes. During World War I, the WOLVERINE, with only shortened masts remaining of her rigging, trained recruits from the area. The beginning of the end for the old "Iron Steamer" came just after the seventy-ninth anniversary of her commissioning, on 12 August 1923; while transiting the Straits of Mackinac on a training cruise, the connecting rod to the port paddlewheel sheared, and the crusty old veteran limped back to Erie on one engine. It was the first major disabling casualty to her engines in the eighty years since their construction. She lay at the Public Pier for 5 years, as the frugal conditions of peacetime navy denied her even the f\ands to weld the connecting rod. In 1928, the last of her ij.0-odd skippers, Commander William L, Morrison, and another old Lakes sailor, Captain P.J. Grant, had towed to her final berth at Crystal Point in Misery Bay, where the Perry Monument looked out over the bay on which the wooden fleet of 1813 had been launched. The Presque Island State Park Commission opened her to the public and now the slow cycle of the seasons went on around her, the summer bringing the tourists and the winter enclosing her in ice and sending howling winds around her silent hull. In the years of World War II, as her indestruetable hull slowly filled with rain water from the rotting decks above, the old gunboat passed her hundreth year,forgotten in the rush of fast carrier task--forces and L\.£f000 ton battleships. Now even her name was gone, the Navy having commissioned a converted sidewheel passenger steamer in Chicago, the training aircraft carrier WOLVERINE. At the time she was scrapped after the war, in 19^8, she was probably the oldest iron ship in the world; but iron is a commodity without emotion in the twentieth century and the old plates, laid up like planks because the builders had knowledge only of wooden ships, were broken up and melted down into a new destiny. References 1) Bennett, Steam Navy 2) U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. April, June, and October, 192k issues 3) Baxter, Introduction of the Ironclad Warship. Harvard, 1933 i|) Bowen, Lore of the Lakes 5) Hatcher, Lake Erie