Fifty years ago this November 10th, the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald freighter battled gale-force winds, nearly 100 mph gusts, monstrous 35-foot waves, and a blinding snowstorm before breaking in two and sinking more than 500 feet to the bottom of Lake Superior in Canadian waters near Whitefish Bay. As immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” all 29 men on board perished.
Conceived as a business enterprise of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and named after its president, the ship built by the Great Lakes Engineering Works was christened and launched before over 10,000 spectators on June 7, 1958. At 729 feet long and 13,632 gross tons, it was the largest ship on the Great Lakes until 1971.
The Fitzgerald’s typical route took it from Silver Bay, Minnesota, on Lake Superior — where it loaded taconite — through Lake Huron to steel mills in the Detroit area (Zug Island, for example, its destination on that date) and near Toledo, Ohio, on Lake Erie. The ship is pictured in 1965 at the Toledo shipping yard.
A year before the tragedy, the Fitzgerald lost its bow anchor near Belle Isle in the Detroit River. It was later recovered and has since been on display at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on the island park. The ship’s 200-pound bronze bell was recovered at the wreck site in 1995 and is displayed at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point in Paradise in the Upper Peninsula.
On the anniversary of the tragedy, memorial ceremonies will take place at three locations, as they do every year. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society will host public and private ceremonies at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. (The private ceremony is reserved for family members but available for the public to live stream on the museum’s website.) The Detroit Historical Society and the Great Lakes Maritime Institute will host a remembrance program at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle, and—as famously mentioned in Lightfoot’s song—the bell at Mariners’ Church in Detroit will once again be rung 29 times, and special programs will be held.
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