For more than 30 years, researchers have scoured the
depths of Lake Superior for vessels lost to time. Each carries a dramatic story
of lives at risk and, many times, lives lost. A stretch of shoreline in
Michigan, US, with about 200 known shipwrecks is called “Graveyard of the Great
Lakes”.
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Among the greatest of those mysteries has been the
disappearance of a fleet belonging to the Edward Hines Lumber Co. On November
18, 1914, the steamboat C.F. Curtis was towing two schooner barges and carrying
3 million board feet of lumber when a surprise storm sent all three boats to
the bottom of Lake Superior. Twenty-eight crew members died across the Curtis
and the two schooners, the Selden E. Marvin and the Annie M. Peterson.
Now, more than 100 years later, researchers with the Great
Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society say part of the mystery of where the boats
sunk has been solved.
“When the robot went down, as soon as they hit it, we saw the age on the smokestack, and we knew it was the Hines fleet.”
The historical society in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
announced last week that it had found two of the fleet’s three boats during
exploratory missions with its research vessel. The Curtis was found in the
summer of 2021, some 150 meters below the surface along with eight other
shipwrecks, and the Selden E. Marvin was found the next summer, about 180
meters below.
The discovery“When the robot went down, as soon as they hit it, we saw
the age on the smokestack, and we knew it was the Hines fleet,” said Ric Mixter,
a maritime historian and a board member of the historical society’s museum. “We
could actually read the paint” of the Edward Hines Lumber logo on the Curtis,
he said.
The two boats were discovered about 40 kilometers off the
shore of Grand Marais, Michigan, about 6 to 8 kilometers from each other. The
museum hopes the third boat, the Annie M. Peterson, will be found next.
“It’s exciting to find something that changes history a
little bit,” Mixter said, “but it’s also sad because it is a grave site for 28
people.”
Finding the Curtis and the Marvin was equal parts luck and
dedication.
The Curtis, Marvin, and Peterson are just three of about
6,000 vessels believed to be shipwrecked in the Great Lakes. Every summer, the
historical society’s 15-meter research boat trawls the waters off the coast of
Whitefish Point to look for sunken ships, even searching through heavily
trafficked active shipping lanes among passing freights as large as 300 meters.
“It’s exciting to find something that changes history a little bit, but it’s also sad because it is a grave site for 28 people.”
The Curtis and the Marvin were found near the area known as
the “Graveyard of the Great Lakes”, largely because of a combination of factors
that include shipping congestion and bad weather. The discovery is considered
to be among the group’s greatest.
Because there were no survivors from the three ships and reports
about the wrecks varied, researchers have had to piece together a record of
what exactly happened on that November day. Historians know that the boats were
part of the Hines fleet — the largest lumber fleet on the Great Lakes at the
time, with eight steamers and 11 barges in all — and that the three boats were
en route to Tonawanda, New York, with enough lumber to build 1,200 houses.
Sunken mysteryStill, there is the mystery of the Peterson to solve, and
the historical society’s research boat will revisit the area where the Curtis
and Marvin were found this summer.
“I’m hoping that the Peterson is going to be relatively
close,” said Bruce Lynn, the executive director of the museum. “We have
searched in those areas, but it’s just never easy. Often they’re in places
you’re not expecting.”
“I’m hoping that the Peterson is going to be relatively close. We have searched in those areas, but it’s just never easy. Often they’re in places you’re not expecting.”
The researchers also hope to find relatives of those who
were lost at sea. No one has come forward so far, but with renewed attention
around the findings, Lynn said he would not be surprised if that changed.
“We do search for these wrecks, and when we’re fortunate —
when we’re lucky to find them — it helps us keep the memory alive of the ships,
of those sailors, male and female, that were onboard those ships, and keep
those stories alive,” Lynn said. “It’s a little bit of history that kind of
gets hidden. It’s under water — nobody thinks about it.”
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