USA TODAY International Edition
Great Lakes museum can float your boats
It’s much more than just the Edmund Fitzgerald
TOLEDO, Ohio – The depth indicator reels off the feet. The air supply counts down the minutes until a return to the surface is mandatory. Meanwhile, the “sub” plows deeper and deeper into the murk.
A map of the bottom of Lake Superior shows the way. A tap of the sub’s toggle to starboard, a little bit to port, forward now, and there it is: the wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
Perhaps the most famous ship disaster on the Great Lakes – and immortalized in song by Gordon Lightfoot – “the Fitz” wreck is simulated on an interactive computer screen, but is an accurate depiction of the final resting place of the freighter that disappeared in a storm on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 crewmembers were lost.
The Fitz dive is a popular feature of the 4-year-old, $12.5 million National Museum of the Great Lakes, established on the banks of the Maumee River just across from downtown Toledo. The city is a major port on Lake Erie.
The mysterious and sudden loss of the freighter – it never sent a distress signal – has a hold on visitors much like the story of the Titanic does. Another freighter was just a mile from the Edmund Fitzgerald and had been radioing back and forth. But in a moment, the Fitz was gone.
“There has not been a marine tragedy on the lakes of that type since,” said John McCarty, the museum’s chief operating officer. “They had radar and ship-to-shore communications, but nothing like what we have today. … Today that ship would have pulled in someplace or never left in the first place.”
An inflatable lifeboat and a set of oars, each stamped with the ship’s name, are on exhibit.
The disaster is just one of many tragedies detailed in unfolding the history of the Great Lakes.
Landlubbers might assume that, compared with the oceans, the lakes are benign environments for shipping. But the estimated 8,000 shipwrecks – from the centuries of sail to the modern age – reveal the risks inherent in these turbulent inland seas.
The museum is not just about shipwrecks. Galleries detail the role of the lakes in Native American culture, the spread of white settlement into the interior of the North American continent, the inevitable conflict between cultures, the wars that settled national borders and futures, the evolution of maritime technology, and the growth of American agriculture and industry.
“The mission is to make known and preserve the history of the Great Lakes,” McCarty said. “We’re a national museum, not a Toledo museum or a Lake Erie museum.”
Visitors can get an even better sense of life aboard ships in the lakes by stepping outside and going aboard the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker, a 617-footlong freighter built in 1911. For the first three years of its service, the ship was the largest on the lakes, earning it the title “Queen of the Lakes.”
The 8,600-ton Schoonmaker offers a good workout: to appreciate it requires climbing stairways leading to the pilothouse, passenger cabins, captain’s cabin and office, crew quarters, mess, officers’ dining room, galley, cargo hold and the multi-story engine room.
The ship carried coal, ore, grain and even cars. But the Shenango Furnace Co., which operated the Schoonmaker until 1969, also boasted some of the best-appointed passenger cabins on the lakes. Visitors can see these fumed oak quarters, featuring cabinets with leaded-glass doors and a rare electric fireplace, that were in their day compared to cabins on the great ocean liners Olympic and Lusitania.
The historic freighter and the museum came together in a happy confluence of events: The ship needed loving care, and the museum was looking to expand and move.
In 2006, Paul LaMarre III wanted to show some friends the ship, but it was closed. He started to drive away but spotted somebody on deck. After much effort, LaMarre convinced the man to come down and speak to him.
“We are closed, we’ve got all sorts of problems with the city, and we don’t have a director for the ship,” LaMarre recalled the man telling him. “I said, ‘Are you taking applications?’”
By 2006, LaMarre recalled, “(the freighter) was listing about 7 degrees to starboard and had 60,000 gallons of water in her ballast tanks and was sitting on the bottom (of the river).”
The old vessel became the focus of a volunteer and philanthropic effort, buttressed by lakes shipping and supply companies that donated time and materials to restore the freighter.
“It represents our maritime heritage – the Maumee River was the vein of industry that the town of Toledo grew up on – and it not only represents its past but its present and its future,” LaMarre said.
LaMarre has the Great Lakes in his family blood: His great-uncles served in ships on the lakes, and his father, Paul C. LaMarre Jr., is a tugboat company executive a prominent maritime artist. When the younger LaMarre was a boy, he had a model of the very ship he would save decades later.
LaMarre became the freighter’s director and then manager of maritime affairs for the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. (He is now director of the port of Monroe, Michigan.)
Meanwhile, the Great Lakes Historical Society was looking to relocate its museum from Vermilion, Ohio, to larger quarters. LaMarre and the society soon realized the Schoonmaker and the unused Toledo building were a perfect match for a new national museum.
On July 1, 2011, the ship was rechristened by a member of the Schoonmaker family. The ship moved to its current berth in 2012, and the museum opened a year and a half later.
Said McCarty, “We put it all together.”