‘A heck of a mystery story’
Lake Michigan shipwreck discovered last month could be the long-lost SS Chicora
It was a risky decision and the crew of the steamship SS Chicora paid for it with their lives.
With shipping on Lake Michigan shut down for the winter, the owner of the SS Chicora booked a trip from the twin cities of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, Mich., to Milwaukee to pick up a load of flour milled from a late harvest of wheat.
The wooden-hulled steamship left Milwaukee at 5 a.m. on Jan. 21, 1895, with its load of flour, crew of 22 and one passenger, a pharmacist heading home to Michigan. The ship reportedly left 10 minutes before a messenger arrived at the dock with a telegram from the ship’s owner warning the captain to stay put because the barometer was falling fast.
It was too late for the Chicora, which vanished after leaving Milwaukee.
Last month, two men looking for the wrecks of World War II planes in Lake Michigan found something that could very well be the SS Chicora. It’s about the same length, same width and features a single smokestack, just like the Chicora.
Taras Lyssenko and business partner Allan Olson of Chicago-based A and T Recovery have recovered about 40 Navy planes that crashed into Lake Michigan during World War II by pilots practicing carrier takeoffs and landings.
Because quagga and zebra mussels are rapidly eroding the aircraft at the bottom of Lake Michigan, Lyssenko and Olson are racing to discover, map and videotape the 60 to 70 planes believed to still be on the bottom.
That’s what they were doing on June 13 in the middle of the southern part of Lake Michigan, operating side-scan sonar in 400 feet of water at the confluence of the nautical borders of Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois.
“We weren’t really paying attention and then all of a sudden we looked at the screen and we were like — it’s a ship. We noted where it was on GPS,” Lyssenko said in a phone interview.
A few days later, Lyssenko looked at a drawing of the SS Chicora and thought it matched. Side-scan sonar is fairly accurate in determining dimensions.
The shipwreck is almost identical to the size of the Chicora. And there are few steamship wrecks of that size with just one smokestack in that part of the lake.
It can’t be identified until a remotely operated vehicle with a video camera is sent for a closer look. Lyssenko hopes that can be done soon.
If it is the Chicora, it’s not where maritime historians and shipwreck hunters thought it would be.
“It’s a heck of a mystery story,” said Brendon Baillod, a Great Lakes maritime historian in Wisconsin. “It’s one of those ships that should have been found already because it supposedly went down off the coast and there was debris.”
Debris including an 8-foot square of decking, oars, both masts and a chair believed to have come from the engineer’s stateroom was found between Saugatuck and South Haven, Mich. Two bottles containing notes washed ashore. Three months after the Chicora disappeared a bottle with this note was found: All is lost, could see land if not snowed and blowed. Engine give out, drifting to shore in ice. Captain and clerk are swept off. We have a hard time of it.
Because of the debris and notes in bottles, historians believed the Chicora was in Michigan waters, not as far out as where the side-scan sonar picked up the image last month.
“People assumed back then and even searchers today, we assumed it would be in Michigan waters. We always assumed it was somewhere along the course line of Milwaukee and Benton Harbor since typically steamships ran a straight line,” said Valerie van Heest, director of Michigan Shipwreck Research Association.
“So this discovery is compelling because that approximate position falls along that course line. The surprise is that it’s so far distant from St. Joe (where debris drifted), which would tell us something about the ability of debris to drift in ice-laden water.”
But van Heest also points out that the messages in bottles could be hoaxes. “Back then a note in a bottle was the equivalent of a tweet.”
The SS Chicora passed into legend as many writers mentioned it, including well-known novelist Nelson Algren who wrote of the ship in his poem “Chicago: City on the Make.”
This is not the first suspected discovery of the Chicora. Van Heest said other shipwreck hunters have reported finding the ship, only to be disappointed when the wreck turned out to be something else.
The Michigan Shipwreck Research Association has done extensive research on the Chicora and mounted a few expeditions in search of the wreck. A 2001 search instead led to the discovery of the H.C. Akeley, a similarly sized steamship.
The difference this time is the toppled single smokestack and the location along the line the Chicora would have sailed on the day it sank.
Lyssenko is trying to assemble a team of historians and experts from Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois to videotape the wreck and possibly establish a satellite link so students can watch live when a remote-controlled robot is sent to take a closer look. The team would include researchers studying the effects of quagga mussels on the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Van Heest included the Chicora in an exhibit she created at the Port of Luddington Maritime Museum in Michigan about undiscovered shipwrecks. Among the items in the exhibit is the chair reported to have come from the Chicora engineer’s cabin and a passenger ticket from a previous voyage on the ship.