Shipwreck Museum

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is located at Whitefish Point Light Station.  As noted earlier, the 80-mile stretch of coastline from Whitefish Point to Munising is Lake Superior's deadliest area.  during the period 1816-1975 this "Graveyard of the Great Lakes" claimed at least 240 ships.  The Shipwreck Museum helps visitors better understand this sad piece of Great Lakes history, as well as the contribution to maritime safety made by aids to navigation.

The Museum's logo shows a sailing ship
caught in a Great Lakes storm.

The light station and museum are synergistic — the lighthouse attracts visitors to the museum, while the museum provides revenue for maintenance of the lighthouse and its related buildings.  Both are operated by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society.  Opinions about GLSHS are divided.  The Society specializes in technical diving at depths beyond the capability of recreational scuba divers.  For this reason they have been able to survey many deep-water wreck sites.  However, some resent the Society taking artifacts for display in their museum while other divers doing the same would be prosecuted for looting.  This area is now part of the Whitefish Point Underwater Preserve, established in 1987 to protect and regulate access to wreck sites.

Whitefish Point was the first light built on Lake Superior, and many consider it the most important aid to navigation on the lake.  Ship traffic on the upper lakes increased dramatically when the locks on the St. Marys River were opened.  Whitefish Point is where many lakers make the turn between bay and lake.  This is not a place where a captain wants to get lost.  In addition, the bay offers storm protection which is lost out on the lake proper.

The combination of crowded shipping lanes and thick Lake Superior fog has proved lethal on many occasions.  For example, the SS Samuel Mather, built in 1887, collided with the steamship Brazil in 1891 near Point Iroquois.  The Mather and her cargo were lost, but her crew survived.  GLSHS has explored this wreck and recovered artifacts for display at the Museum.

Behind a model of the Samuel Mather is a painting of
the wreck as surveyed by GLSHS.

Explanatory cards give Museum visitors a sense of
what this facility and GLSHS does.

 All of the Great Lakes are subject to nasty weather — sometimes monumentally nasty.  The Carl D. Bradley, home ported at Rogers City in Presque Isle County, ran afoul of the weather in Lake Michigan, with lethal consequences.  Launched in 1927, this 639-foot bulk carrier hauled limstone for Michigan Limestone, a division of U.S. Steel, which then operated the Calcite Limestone Quarry.  In November 1958 the Bradley was en route from Gary, Indiana, to Rogers City when it encountered a vicious storm near Lake Michigan's Gull Island, west of Charlevoix.  Only two members of the 35-man crew survived.  Each year the Bradley and its crew are remembered in ceremonies at Rogers City.

The Bradley's resting place has been explored by
the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society.

Lake Superior's storms are legendary.  The lake has a surface area nearly as large as the State of South Carolina.  Storms moving across this vast expanse of open water routinely generate waves of 20 feet, and waves 30-35 feet have been recorded.  These massive storms can develop quickly, catching ships unawares.

That was the fate of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.  Launched in 1958, the Fitzgerald was making its way through Canadian waters toward Whitefish Bay when it suddenly sank with loss of all 29 crew members.  The cause of the sinking has never been discovered.  Some believe the ship may have shoaled (grounded on a reef) during the storm, which would have left it structurally compromised.  Others speculate that a series of three rogue waves up to 35 feet in height may have overwhelmed the ship and sent her to the bottom.

In 1995, at the request of families of the Edmund Fitzgerald's crew, GLSHS recovered the ship's bell and placed it on display at the Museum.

The ship's bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald is a
sad reminder of a very sad event.

We can count shipwrecks.  Yet literally countless ships, crews, and cargoes have been kept from harm by the various aids to navigation in use on the Great Lakes over the past two centuries.  These range from small lights marking the entrance channels to harbors, to gigantic lights atop coastal and island lighthouses.  Consider, for example, the Second Order Fresnel Lens which once marked White Shoal some 20 west of the Straits of Mackinac.  This 3,500-pound lens floated on a bed of liquid mercury, which provided nearly frictionless rotation.  A clockwork mechanism, very similar to that of a grandfather clock, provided the rotation, and had to be wound every 2 hours and 18 minutes through the night. 

The White Shoal Lens is very impressive!

During college I tried to get a summer job as a steward on a lake freighter.  My assignment didn't come through until August, just before school was to start, and I could not accept the job.  If I had, my first experience of life on the Great Lakes might have been the Storms of November, about which Gordon Lightfoot would sing in the wake of the loss of the Fitzgerald.

I finished my day at Marquette. •••