Alpena

Built in 1909, the Alpena was a self-unloader that carried freight on the Great Lakes. Owned by the Wyandotte Transportation Company of Michigan, she later was rechristened the Sidney E. Smith Jr. by the Erie Sand Steamship Company and scrapped in 1972.

Great Lakes Marine Collection-MPL/WMHS

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Angeline

The Angeline was a 423-foot freighter built in 1899 in Detroit, Mich. She was sold as a floating grain storage facility in 1955 and scrapped in 1965. Here the vessel is making its way on the Milwaukee River under the Wells Street bridge.

Great Lakes Marine Collection-MPL/WMHS

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Edmund Fitzgerald

The Edmund Fitzgerald carried taconite iron ore from Duluth, Minn., to iron works near several Great Lakes ports. Launched on June 7, 1958, the 727-foot ship sank during a Lake Superior storm on Nov. 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29.

Great Lakes Marine Collection - MPL / WMHS

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Where's JENNIFER? Lost in late 1974, but where? In the Milwaukee Basin?

Thousands of shipwrecks are scattered on the bottoms of the Great Lakes.

Jim Heinz, a former diver and WMHS member, chronicles the story of one of those ships, known as the JENNIFER, whose wreck is thought to be on the western side of Lake Michigan. The approximately 200-foot long vessel went by various names since it was built in 1964.

On Nov. 30, 1974, she and her crew of 15 were making their way south from Sault Ste. Marie to Milwaukee carrying 1,406 tons of steel plates. The seas were high and the winds stiff. Late that night she radioed a distress call. The Coast Guard dispatched lifeboats from Milwaukee and Sheboygan, but the weather forced them to turn back.

At midnight the ship could not maintain her course because the propeller was not biting deep enough in the water.

A buried ship and 2 lighthouse keepers a century apart are grist for two novels 

The Wisconsin Marine Historical Society is reading The Dig, John Preston’s historical novel about Sutton Hoo, the enthralling English archeological site. While the author takes some literary license, his story draws on real people and the very real excavation of an Anglo-Saxon ship discovered in Suffolk in 1939.

Members will discuss the book over Zoom at 7 p.m. Sept. 15.

Hazel Gaynor’s The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter is the agenda for the Oct. 20 Zoomed night meeting.

Inspired by true events, and the extraordinary female lighthouse keepers of the past two hundred years, the novel explores how past events shape the present, and what it means to be courageous.

Once a guiding beacon, lightship now buried in park along Lake Michigan

James Heinz reconstructs the story of LIGHT VESSEL NO. 57, built in 1891, now covered by gravel fill in a Milwaukee County park.

His story takes the reader on a journey from the ship’s government service in 1891 to its scrapping in 1924.