This sidewheel passenger steamer entered service in 1878 as the first of three vessels to bear the name City of Detroit, but would spend a majority of its life sailing under the name City of the Straits.

The wood-hulled vessel was designed by Frank E. Kirby for the Detroit & Cleveland Steam Navigation Co. - the first of many steamers the naval architect would design for the company. The City of Detroit (I) was 234 feet long with a cabin capacity of 236 passengers. She was built at a cost of $135,000, or a little more than $4 million in 2025 valuation, when adjusted for inflation.

She was launched at Wyandotte, Mich., on Dec. 22, 1877, as Hull No. 31 for the Detroit Dry Dock Co. Her first engine - a coal-fired, vertical beam model that pumped out 1,800 indicated horsepower - came from the steamer R.N. Rice. The R.N. Rice was one of the largest side-wheel passenger steamers on the Great Lakes when she was built in 1866, but was destroyed by a fire on June 10, 1877, while she was docked in Detroit. Think of the transplanted engine as the 19th century equivalent of mechanical organ donation.

The City of Detroit would enter service on May 11, 1878, and ran the Detroit-to-Cleveland route. She would have a collision on Aug. 16, 1882, with the steam barge Araxes near Boblo Island (then called Bois Blanc Island) in the Detroit River, but survived the accident.

In 1889, D&C brought out a new steamer that it also named the City of Detroit (which in turn would later become the City of Detroit II when an even newer City of Detroit entered service in 1912). This led to the first City of Detroit being renamed the City of the Straits, a name she would keep for nearly three decades. She ran between Chicago and St. Joseph, Mich., for that first season under her new name before being switched to an excursion route between Cleveland and Put-In-Bay, Ohio. She would go on to sail between Chicago and Benton Harbor, Mich., and then later between Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio.

In 1905, she was chartered from D&C by the Hackley Transportation Co. to run between Muskegon, Grand Haven and Chicago on Lake Michigan.

Her passenger-carrying days would come to an end in 1915, having become outdated and outclassed by a number of newer vessels in D&C's fleet. She was sold to Baker & Leonard and reduced to a barge at Detroit, though she would hang onto the name City of the Straits until 1918. At that point, she was sold to C.S. Neff of Milwaukee and turned into a schooner barge and renamed the Liberty.

In 1924, she was bought by the Hayward & Nicholson Co., and four years later rebuilt at the Great Lakes Engine Works as a diesel-powered bulk freighter for the steel trade under the Nicholson Transit Co.

Liberty was taken out of service in 1940 and wound up abandoned at the head of Boblo Island in the Detroit River, where the wood hull caught fire and burned eight years later.