Discovering Sunken Ships
From James Donahue’s Journal
I think I always knew there were shipwrecks in Lake Huron. As a child growing up on Lake Huron, I recall a day at the beach with friends and observing the skeletal remains of what had been a wooden ship jutting up out of the water no more than a half mile off shore. The lake level apparently was lower than usual that summer thus exposing the wreck.
I remember asking an adult near me about the thing I was looking at. This person said he knew nothing about it, but that it looked like the remains of an old shipwreck. The following year the water was back up to its usual level and I saw the wreck no more.
When on the Sandusky News Bureau, I was working one summer day at the historic spot that was once known as Grindstone City, a place on the lake shore where a particular kind of stone was mined and cut into grindstones. It was the perfect material for grinding down metal knives and other tools. It had been a major industry for the area in its day. Now all that remained was an abandoned hotel building, a dock and a few other buildings. A few of the houses were occupied.
While at the dock I met a man who said he was a sport diver and was in the area to search for shipwrecks. This man had an interesting story to tell He said he believed there were hundreds if not thousands of shipwrecks laying right off the coast. He said ships had been disappearing in storms on the lakes since shipping first began in the late Eighteenth Century. I was fascinated by his story, but at that time had no way of hanging a story on what he was telling me.
My interest in Great Lakes shipwrecks sprang back to life the day Steve Romzek, superintendent of the Huron County Park system, asked me to drive up to get a story about the new Huron County Underwater Preserve.
It seems that sport divers, some of them armed with small portable side-scan sonar devices, were discovering that the bottom of the Great Lakes was, indeed, a graveyard of sunken wrecks after all those years of shipping. A number of the wrecks were in water shallow enough for sport divers to safely reach and explore, right off the Huron County shoreline. The State of Michigan was permitting private groups like dive clubs in cooperation with the county governments surrounding the lakes, to declare areas where shipwreck clusters were known as special preserves. This meant that divers were welcome to visit, but not remove anything from the wrecks. They were all considered part of a unique kind of museum, where divers could visit and get a unique glimpse of the past.
Romzek was all excited because Huron County had just been approved for having its own underwater preserve. When I got there, he had researched the history of about five or six vessels that were known to lie on the bottom of Lake Huron between Harbor Beach north to Pointe aux Barques and then west into Saginaw Bay. He believed more would be discovered as divers explored the area.
Romzek had even gone so far as to purchase eight-by-ten glossy photographs of the ships he listed. I wrote the story Romzek wanted, complete with pictures and a general review of the wrecks he believed were lying within the preserve. But as soon as I could, I drove into Port Huron and spent a day in the Times Herald’s morgue, researching details about each of the wrecks on Romzek’s list in the microfilm files. My plan was to write a special feature story about each wreck, explaining when and how each disaster occurred.
As I searched the files, however, I discovered at least one other wreck in the Huron County area that was not on Romzek’s list. Also I uncovered stories about other ships that sank further south along the shore off Harbor Beach, Lexington and White Rock. Some of these ships sank in storms, some in collision, and others burned. Some just ran aground and broke up in storms. Within a few hours I discovered that there was a gold mine in historic Great Lakes shipwreck stories to be had for the taking.
I went home that afternoon with a plan to research all of the wrecks I could find in our reading area, from Saginaw north to Point aux Barques, and south along the Lake Huron coast to Port Huron. It seemed at the time to be a relatively small task. It did not occur to me that to get these stories, I would have to read all of the microfilm files of our newspaper for as far back as the newspaper existed. And there was an even earlier history of the lakes which I found in other newspaper microfilm, taken from earlier existing area newspapers, on file in the Port Huron Public Library. And to get even more information, I ended up driving to the Detroit Public Library, and finally to the Institute For Great Lakes Research in Perrysburg, Ohio. It was at the institute that I hit pay dirt, both on news clippings but on historic photographs of the ships that sank.
The more research I did the more expanded my project became. Soon I had wonderful shipwreck stories from all of the Great Lakes, I found myself becoming obsessed with this new hobby. I devoted an entire week of my summer vacation working at Perrysburg and living in a two-bit motel that stunk of cigars and years of human filth.
I found great stories of collision and disaster on the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers. I read about a sole survivor of a ship sinking off our coast and read that the man was a native of Erie, Pennsylvania. The next summer during my vacation, I drove beyond Perrysburg to Erie and read the microfilm stories in that city’s library. Sure enough, the first-hand account of how this man survived the wreck and lived to tell about it was recorded in graphic detail in that file. I drove on that year to Buffalo, New York, and discovered the microfilm files in that library contained yet another rich harvest of wreck stories to be uncovered.
The following summer I devoted two full weeks to research, traveling back to Buffalo, west along Lake Erie to Perrysburg, then on to Chicago and north to Milwaukee. The Chicago library was filled with wonderful and very dusty files tucked away on an upper floor where few people ever went. The library was located in a very shady part of town where I wasn’t sure I was going to get in and out alive, or with my car intact. I only made that one stop there and never went back, as much as I longed to. It was tempting but just too dangerous.
What began as a little series of stories for the Times Herald had mushroomed into something much larger. I wanted to expand my stories beyond the scope of the newspaper’s reading area. At first my editors were opposed to it. But after my stories proved to be popular, and that they all were exciting little adventure stories, I gradually got my way. It was not long after that when I began syndicating the stories in other Michigan newspapers. They went as far north as the Marquette Mining Journal and the Traverse City Record Eagle.
My stories became popular among the sailors working on the lakes. One captain that made his home in St. Clair County called me one winter and offered me a free pass to ride his iron ore carrier from Port Huron to Duluth and back. It was a two-week trip or longer and I had to decline, since I could not get that much time off from my job. I would rather spend the vacation time with my family or researching shipwrecks. But we had a nice visit. He told me that my stories were always pasted on the bulletin board in the ship’s galley. His vessel called at Port Huron every time it came through, just to get the newspapers with my weekly stories in them.
I also became well known to the local Coast Guard. I got an invitation to spend a day on the Port Huron based cutter Bramble. I was allowed to stand on the ship’s bridge and visit all of the parts of the ship during that cruse. They also furnished a meal in the galley. The trip down the river was to pull a defective buoy and replace it with another one. That was the primary job of the Coast Guard cutters, to set and take care of the many buoys placed to guide the big boats through the twisting, winding course they follow to stay in deep water.
On the way back up the St. Clair River that afternoon we had the privilege of passing various freighters and then we passed the Coast Guard Icebreaker Mackinaw, steaming on a voyage south to Detroit. I had no idea as I watched that great old ship pass us that day that I also would be walking on her decks within a few months.
Indeed, because of my interest and growing knowledge of Great Lakes ships, I quickly gained a reputation as an authority on Great Lakes shipping and history. I had an editor that decided to send me on a state-wide trip to visit the various Coast Guard stations to research and produce a story on the operations of the Coast Guard in Michigan. The trip took me west to Grand Haven, which is an active station on Lake Michigan, then east to Alpena where the mighty Mackinaw was moored. There I had the privilege of meeting the ship’s captain and getting a grand tour of the vessel. It was a massive ship, and I was especially surprised at the luxury quarters enjoyed by the captain. He lived in a large suite with all of the accommodations of a grand hotel.
That ship was retired in 2006 after a 62-year career on the lakes. Its primary job was to do what its name implied, steam out ahead of the first pack of freighters each spring and break open waterways through the ice packs. Sometimes the Mackinaw was able to keep lanes open for year around shipping, especially during wartime.
From James Donahue’s Journal
I think I always knew there were shipwrecks in Lake Huron. As a child growing up on Lake Huron, I recall a day at the beach with friends and observing the skeletal remains of what had been a wooden ship jutting up out of the water no more than a half mile off shore. The lake level apparently was lower than usual that summer thus exposing the wreck.
I remember asking an adult near me about the thing I was looking at. This person said he knew nothing about it, but that it looked like the remains of an old shipwreck. The following year the water was back up to its usual level and I saw the wreck no more.
When on the Sandusky News Bureau, I was working one summer day at the historic spot that was once known as Grindstone City, a place on the lake shore where a particular kind of stone was mined and cut into grindstones. It was the perfect material for grinding down metal knives and other tools. It had been a major industry for the area in its day. Now all that remained was an abandoned hotel building, a dock and a few other buildings. A few of the houses were occupied.
While at the dock I met a man who said he was a sport diver and was in the area to search for shipwrecks. This man had an interesting story to tell He said he believed there were hundreds if not thousands of shipwrecks laying right off the coast. He said ships had been disappearing in storms on the lakes since shipping first began in the late Eighteenth Century. I was fascinated by his story, but at that time had no way of hanging a story on what he was telling me.
My interest in Great Lakes shipwrecks sprang back to life the day Steve Romzek, superintendent of the Huron County Park system, asked me to drive up to get a story about the new Huron County Underwater Preserve.
It seems that sport divers, some of them armed with small portable side-scan sonar devices, were discovering that the bottom of the Great Lakes was, indeed, a graveyard of sunken wrecks after all those years of shipping. A number of the wrecks were in water shallow enough for sport divers to safely reach and explore, right off the Huron County shoreline. The State of Michigan was permitting private groups like dive clubs in cooperation with the county governments surrounding the lakes, to declare areas where shipwreck clusters were known as special preserves. This meant that divers were welcome to visit, but not remove anything from the wrecks. They were all considered part of a unique kind of museum, where divers could visit and get a unique glimpse of the past.
Romzek was all excited because Huron County had just been approved for having its own underwater preserve. When I got there, he had researched the history of about five or six vessels that were known to lie on the bottom of Lake Huron between Harbor Beach north to Pointe aux Barques and then west into Saginaw Bay. He believed more would be discovered as divers explored the area.
Romzek had even gone so far as to purchase eight-by-ten glossy photographs of the ships he listed. I wrote the story Romzek wanted, complete with pictures and a general review of the wrecks he believed were lying within the preserve. But as soon as I could, I drove into Port Huron and spent a day in the Times Herald’s morgue, researching details about each of the wrecks on Romzek’s list in the microfilm files. My plan was to write a special feature story about each wreck, explaining when and how each disaster occurred.
As I searched the files, however, I discovered at least one other wreck in the Huron County area that was not on Romzek’s list. Also I uncovered stories about other ships that sank further south along the shore off Harbor Beach, Lexington and White Rock. Some of these ships sank in storms, some in collision, and others burned. Some just ran aground and broke up in storms. Within a few hours I discovered that there was a gold mine in historic Great Lakes shipwreck stories to be had for the taking.
I went home that afternoon with a plan to research all of the wrecks I could find in our reading area, from Saginaw north to Point aux Barques, and south along the Lake Huron coast to Port Huron. It seemed at the time to be a relatively small task. It did not occur to me that to get these stories, I would have to read all of the microfilm files of our newspaper for as far back as the newspaper existed. And there was an even earlier history of the lakes which I found in other newspaper microfilm, taken from earlier existing area newspapers, on file in the Port Huron Public Library. And to get even more information, I ended up driving to the Detroit Public Library, and finally to the Institute For Great Lakes Research in Perrysburg, Ohio. It was at the institute that I hit pay dirt, both on news clippings but on historic photographs of the ships that sank.
The more research I did the more expanded my project became. Soon I had wonderful shipwreck stories from all of the Great Lakes, I found myself becoming obsessed with this new hobby. I devoted an entire week of my summer vacation working at Perrysburg and living in a two-bit motel that stunk of cigars and years of human filth.
I found great stories of collision and disaster on the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers. I read about a sole survivor of a ship sinking off our coast and read that the man was a native of Erie, Pennsylvania. The next summer during my vacation, I drove beyond Perrysburg to Erie and read the microfilm stories in that city’s library. Sure enough, the first-hand account of how this man survived the wreck and lived to tell about it was recorded in graphic detail in that file. I drove on that year to Buffalo, New York, and discovered the microfilm files in that library contained yet another rich harvest of wreck stories to be uncovered.
The following summer I devoted two full weeks to research, traveling back to Buffalo, west along Lake Erie to Perrysburg, then on to Chicago and north to Milwaukee. The Chicago library was filled with wonderful and very dusty files tucked away on an upper floor where few people ever went. The library was located in a very shady part of town where I wasn’t sure I was going to get in and out alive, or with my car intact. I only made that one stop there and never went back, as much as I longed to. It was tempting but just too dangerous.
What began as a little series of stories for the Times Herald had mushroomed into something much larger. I wanted to expand my stories beyond the scope of the newspaper’s reading area. At first my editors were opposed to it. But after my stories proved to be popular, and that they all were exciting little adventure stories, I gradually got my way. It was not long after that when I began syndicating the stories in other Michigan newspapers. They went as far north as the Marquette Mining Journal and the Traverse City Record Eagle.
My stories became popular among the sailors working on the lakes. One captain that made his home in St. Clair County called me one winter and offered me a free pass to ride his iron ore carrier from Port Huron to Duluth and back. It was a two-week trip or longer and I had to decline, since I could not get that much time off from my job. I would rather spend the vacation time with my family or researching shipwrecks. But we had a nice visit. He told me that my stories were always pasted on the bulletin board in the ship’s galley. His vessel called at Port Huron every time it came through, just to get the newspapers with my weekly stories in them.
I also became well known to the local Coast Guard. I got an invitation to spend a day on the Port Huron based cutter Bramble. I was allowed to stand on the ship’s bridge and visit all of the parts of the ship during that cruse. They also furnished a meal in the galley. The trip down the river was to pull a defective buoy and replace it with another one. That was the primary job of the Coast Guard cutters, to set and take care of the many buoys placed to guide the big boats through the twisting, winding course they follow to stay in deep water.
On the way back up the St. Clair River that afternoon we had the privilege of passing various freighters and then we passed the Coast Guard Icebreaker Mackinaw, steaming on a voyage south to Detroit. I had no idea as I watched that great old ship pass us that day that I also would be walking on her decks within a few months.
Indeed, because of my interest and growing knowledge of Great Lakes ships, I quickly gained a reputation as an authority on Great Lakes shipping and history. I had an editor that decided to send me on a state-wide trip to visit the various Coast Guard stations to research and produce a story on the operations of the Coast Guard in Michigan. The trip took me west to Grand Haven, which is an active station on Lake Michigan, then east to Alpena where the mighty Mackinaw was moored. There I had the privilege of meeting the ship’s captain and getting a grand tour of the vessel. It was a massive ship, and I was especially surprised at the luxury quarters enjoyed by the captain. He lived in a large suite with all of the accommodations of a grand hotel.
That ship was retired in 2006 after a 62-year career on the lakes. Its primary job was to do what its name implied, steam out ahead of the first pack of freighters each spring and break open waterways through the ice packs. Sometimes the Mackinaw was able to keep lanes open for year around shipping, especially during wartime.