These images come with lots of questions, and I enjoy your answers.  A crane with the Ford logo on the control house lifts a vintage Ford automobile from  . . .  

freighter called Edgewater, registered in Dearborn.  I trust you’re formulating lots of questions, like what year, what location, what do we know about Edgewater.  What do you make of the steam emanating from the stern of the vessel above?

Fortunately some unidentified photography team chose to get a photo of the entire vessel from the water side as well.  This biggest clue to the what year question is the design of the cars themselves.  Ideas?  I find it interesting that a relatively small number of completed cars rest atop the water-shedding deck;  a much great load of spare parts and any other cargo would be enclosed in the hold below.  It appears that fewer than 20 cars would be carried?   If so, were they special order cars?  Were they covered in transit?  See the steam again?

 Edgewater was named for one of the locations of Ford assembly plants.  Up near the intersection of the Barge Canal and the Hudson River was a Ford plant in Green Island, NY.  Much more info about Edgewater and her sister ship Chester can be found here and here.  If you’re on Facebook, here’s even more.  Edgewater was torn down in 2006.  Green Island was torn down in 2004 after ceasing operations in 1988.

Below is the complete photo I found from the water side.  I believe this shows the freighter at the Green Island plant, and the date corresponds to the design of the automobiles, 1936.

The comments below by William Lafferty I copied from the Facebook post linked above.  Dr. Lafferty writes about Edgewater that, “it occasionally went as far west as the Ford plant on the Calumet River at Chicago. Launched at River Rouge 9 May 1931 by the Great Lakes Engineering Works and beginning its maiden voyage on 17 August 1931 to its namesake, the mammoth and recently completed New Jersey auto plant of its owner, the Ford Motor Company, in the photograph below Edgewater struts its stuff for news cameras on 26 August 1931 before the vessel was opened for public inspection at the plant. It had first stopped to unload 700 tons of Ford auto components at Ford’s Green Island assembly plant at Troy, New York, and arrived at Edgewater 25 August 1931. The vessel appears to be headed north on the Hudson, approaching the new George Washington Bridge. Designed to connect Dearborn with Ford’s eastern plants via the New York State Barge Canal, the Edgewater had a retractable pilothouse and masts, as well as a funnel that could be lowered into a trough on deck, allowing it to negotiate the many low bridges of the canal. All but the aft mast are shown retracted here, the funnel in process of being lowered. Twin 3-cylinder Westinghouse steam turbines supplied by two Combustion Engineering water tube boilers, a power plant decision by Ford I have never understood, powered the vessel and its sister, Chester. Ford’s subsequent Barge Canal boats, the Green Island and Norfolk of 1937, would be powered by twin Cooper Bessemer Diesels of lesser horsepower. Purchased by Cleveland Tankers, Inc., in 1947, the Bethlehem Steel Company at Staten Island, New York, converted it to a very quizzical looking tanker late that year and renamed it Orion in spring 1949. It was broken up at Ashtabula in the fall of 1964.”

I’ve not located a photo of Orion, to see how strange it might have looked.  The archives link for Bethlehem Staten Island shows builds only, not conversions.

Any additions to the Fords on the Barge Canal story are appreciated.