USS Houston, a 4525 gross ton cargo ship, was built in Germany in 1903 as the civilian freighter Liebenfels. When the August 1914 outbreak of World War I made the high seas unsafe for German merchant ships she was laid up at Charleston, South Carolina. Though her crew scuttled her as relations between Germany and the United States deteriorated in early 1917, Liebenfels was salvaged and refitted for U.S. Navy service.

Commissioned in early July 1917 as USS Houston, she took part in the vast effort to establish and maintain a large U.S. military force in Western Europe. Following the August 1918 Armistice the ship transported cargo between the East and West Coasts of the United States. In mid-1920, while so employed, she received the hull number AK-1. Houston voyaged from New York to the Philippines in May-October 1921, then steamed across the Pacific to San Francisco, California. She was decommissioned in March 1922 and sold in September of that year. Her name was changed to North King in 1923, while in commercial service, and she was not scrapped until about 1957.