USAT Buford
USAT Buford at Galveston harbor in 1915
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| Builder: | Harland and Wolff, Belfast |
| Launched: | August 29, 1890 |
| Commissioned: | By the US Navy on January 15, 1919 |
| Decommissioned: | September 2, 1919 |
| Fate: | Scrapped in 1929 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Cargo ship |
| Displacement: | 8,583 tons |
| Length: | 370 ft 8 in (112.98 m) |
| Beam: | 44 ft 2 in (13.46 m) |
| Draft: | 26 ft (7.9 m) |
| Depth of hold: | 30 ft 6 in (9.30 m) |
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| Speed: | 11 knots (20 km/h) |
| Complement: | 202 |
| Armament: | 2 × 3" mounts |
USAT Buford was a combination cargo/passenger ship, originally launched in 1890 as the SS Mississippi. She was purchased by the US Army in 1898 for transport duty in the Spanish-American War. In 1919, she was briefly transferred to the US Navy, commissioned as the USS Buford (ID 3818), to repatriate troops home after World War I, and then later that year returned to the Army.
In December 1919, nicknamed the Soviet Ark (or the Red Ark) by the press of the day, the Buford was used by the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Labor to deport 249 non-citizens to Russia from the United States because of their alleged anarchist or syndicalist political beliefs.
She was sold to private interests in 1923, contracted in mid-1924 to be the set for Buster Keaton's silent film The Navigator, and finally scrapped in 1929.
The ship began life as the SS Mississippi, constructed by Harland & Wolff of Belfast, Ireland for Bernard N. Baker of Baltimore and the Atlantic Transport Line. While under de facto American ownership, she would fly the British flag, due to the economies of the navigation laws of the period. The Mississippi was launched on August 29, 1890 and began her maiden voyage, from London, on October 28, 1890. In command was her first captain, Hamilton Murrell, "Hero of the Danmark Disaster," who a year earlier had saved 735 lives from the sinking Danish passenger ship Danmark, the largest single rescue at the time.
For the first year of her career, the Mississippi plied the waters between London, Swansea, Philadelphia and Baltimore.
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