By James Heinz
Although the ROUSE SIMMONS with its load of Christmas trees sank nearly 110 years ago, its memory has not been forgotten, nor has its mission to deliver firs to make the holiday merry.
On the morning of December 4, I witnessed the modern day version of the Christmas Tree Ship in Chicago, where the U.S. Coast Guard vessel, the USCGC MACKINAW, delivered 1,200 Christmas trees. From the city’s waterfront, just south of the famed Navy Pier, local youth groups loaded the trees onto trucks for distribution to the needy. An hour later, high school students and the Coast Guard glee club sang songs as a high school ROTC unit presented the colors.
Members of the Shipmasters Association laid a wreath in memory of all mariners lost at sea. A Chicago Fire Department helicopter flew overhead and out over the lake past the Chicago breakwater light and dropped a wreath in open water as a memorial to mariners lost.
The original schooner, which foundered killing all aboard on November 23, 1912, was special to the people of Chicago. As the wisconsinshipwrecks.org website recounts, “The sailors and lumbermen aboard were bringing Christmas joy to the city, and they were willing to risk their lives to make Christmas merrier.”
To continue this tradition, some Chicago residents in 2000 decided to bring back the custom of giving free Christmas trees to the poor. They persuaded the Coast Guard to bring the trees to Chicago on one of its ships.
Rear Admiral Michael Johnston, commander of the Coast Guard’s Ninth District, headquartered in Cleveland, spoke at the occasion. The Ninth Coast Guard District is responsible for all Coast Guard operations throughout the five Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence Seaway and parts of the surrounding states including 6,700 miles of shoreline and 1,500 miles of the international border with Canada.
Speaking at the ceremony, Commander Kristen Serumgard, the eighth commander of the MACKINAW, said that as of this year, the Coast Guard had delivered 26,599 trees to Chicago. She said that every year Herman Schuenemann, captain of the ROUSE SIMMONS, would bring about 5,500 trees to the Clark Street dock in the Chicago River. There he sold some of them for 50 cents, with some reserved for those too poor to afford them. This year the MACKINAW carried trees from her home port of Cheboygan, Mich., at the top of the lower Michigan Peninsula.
She said that every year crew members of the MACKINAW hold a wreath laying ceremony in honor of the ROUSE SIMMONS. The crew is mustered on the buoy deck, a wreath is deposited on Lake Michigan, and the MACKINAW’s bell is rung.
In her previous assignment as commander of the International Ice Patrol, Serumgard said she had participated in the annual wreath laying ceremony over the grave of the TITANIC which, like the ROUSE SIMMONS, sank in 1912.
“We stand,” she said to the gathering at the Chicago dock, “in solidarity with all the Christmas Tree Ships of the past.” She went on to tell the story of a little girl named Ruthie, who was left waiting at the Clark Street dock in 1912. When told there would be no Christmas trees that year, Ruthie replied, “Without a tree, there is no Christmas.”
At the conclusion of the observance, a ceremonial gun was fired several times, and the MACKINAW sounded her horn as a memorial to the lost Christmas tree ship and all those who go in peril on the sea.
Captain Schuenemann would have been proud.
Photo at top of page: MACKINAW on mission in Cheboygan to deliver Christmas Trees to Chicago, December 2021. Photo of MACKINAW Facebook page.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
