Love it! Lakers are my favorite ship genre.
They call it a steam barge, which to many folks seems like an oxymoron. Some would take it to mean a ship that was built as a towed consort and then converted to steam power, but it can also be interpreted as a steamship with a very full hull form. One meaning of the word barge is a boat or ship with very full lines- that is, a high prismatic coeffficient. The later is the ratio of its actual displacement to a rectangular block with the same length, width and draft.
I particularly like lakers of about that period!