by Larry Tritten
ImageLake Superior is 350 miles long with a breadth of 160 miles. It is large enough in surface area and volume to contain all the other Great Lakes plus three more the size of Lake Erie. On Lake Superior’s coast, the Shipwreck Museum consists of eight historic structures at the site of the Whitefish Point Light Station, the oldest working light station on Lake Superior.
There are hundreds of lighthouses on the Great Lakes and 6,000 shipwrecks in the lakes, figures that give an idea of how dangerous navigation on the lakes is because of frequent nasty storms that make their waters almost as threatening as the open ocean.
The Shipwreck Museum addresses shipwrecks, the lighthouse service dedicated to trying to prevent them, and the lifesaving service offering assistance. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has spent 20 years restoring the site to the way it looked in the early 20th century before it fell into disrepair and was abandoned by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1970. The original 1849 stone tower lighthouse could not endure the elements of Lake Superior’s coastline and was replaced in 1861. The society also restored the 1861 lightkeeper’s quarters, 1923 lookout tower, 1937 fog signal building, 1923 U.S. Coast Guard crews quarters building, and the 1923 surfboat house. The latter is the museum’s newest exhibit and features full-size functional replicas of a beach cart and 26-foot Beebe-McClellan surfboat used by the U.S. Lifesaving Service, the “storm warriors” whose brave motto was, “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”
Once, artifacts found by scuba divers like Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, ended up in private collections. But in 1978, a small group of teachers, divers, and historians organized to find a home for such artifacts and tell the stories of the 30,000 people who have died in Great Lakes shipwrecks.
The museum’s displays tell those stories in a chronological sequence, from Native Americans and early French trappers to the days of the first recorded shipwrecks. The first known shipwreck was the Griffon, built by the French explorer Rene-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, and which disappeared in Lake Michigan in 1679. Displays include artifacts from the Niagara, the Comet, the John M. Osborn, the Vienna, the Samuel Mather, and other ships lost along Lake Superior’s “Shipwreck Coast.” Studying the exhibits, one listens to the sound of fog horns, the cries of sea gulls, and the melancholy lyrics of Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which tells the story of the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck. The bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald, salvaged by divers at the request of the surviving families, stands at the entrance of the museum. The Fitzgerald was a 729-foot ore carrier that sank in a fierce winter storm in 1975 with the loss of its 29-man crew. A 20-minute video tells the dramatic story of the Fitzgerald and the raising of the bell.
In the center of the museum’s gallery stands a nine-foot-diameter, 3,500-pound Second Order Fresnel lens of the White Shoal Light in Lake Michigan, its 344 separate leaded crystal prisms giving testimony to the extreme radiance designed to beckon ships from a 16-mile distance.
The museum offers a unique experience for the visitor who wants to truly capture a sense of history: overnight accommodations. One can stay in restored 1923 Coast Guard lifeboat stations crews quarters, which also has a library stocked with books and videos on Great Lakes shipwrecks.
Nearby, glass-bottom boat tours are the perfect way to complement the museum experience. I got an unexpected dramatic bonus on the tour I took in the form of a spectacular storm that seemed to appear spontaneously and chased us back to shore with bolts of flashing lightning, a graphic example of why some ships are on the bottoms of the Great Lakes.
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Larry Tritten is a freelance writer who ives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Reader’s Digest, among other publications.
