By James Heinz
Earlier this year a fascinating story about Lake Michigan lightships appeared on this website. The authors, Ken and Barb Wardius, tell tales of these floating lighthouses, including one called MILWAUKEE LIGHTSHIP NO. 95 that was stationed three miles off Milwaukee from 1912 to 1932 to guide ships to the city’s harbor. Also mentioned is the HURON NO. 103 which is the only remaining lightship on the Great Lakes and you can visit it afloat as a museum in Port Huron, Michigan.
But before we close this chapter on lightships, there’s one more I’d like to tell you about. It has the unusual distinction of being buried under a Milwaukee County park alongside Lake Michigan.
This is the story of LIGHTSHIP NO. 57. She was built in 1891 in Toledo, Ohio, by the Craig Shipbuilding Company at a cost of $14,225, Wikipedia reports. One of three sister federal light vessels on Lake Michigan, the ship was designed to avoid constructing a more costly permanent lighthouse.
Built of white oak planks fastened together with 5.8-inch spikes, she was 90 feet long with a beam 20 feet wide and a 9-foot deep draft. Her gross weight was 130 tons with a net register tonnage of 101 tons. Her beacons consisted of clusters of three oil-burning lens lanterns hoisted onto each of her two masts. She had a top speed of 8 knots, about 9.2 m.p.h., which was fast for a vessel that was intended to not go anywhere.
From 1891 to 1923, NO. 57 was stationed at Grays Reef, a rocky ridge eighteen miles west of the Mackinac Bridge in northeastern Lake Michigan. She moved there to provide a beacon for the increased ship traffic in the area.
I recently spoke with lifelong Bay View resident and amateur historian John Ebersol. He provided me with a copy of an article about NO. 57 that he wrote for the July/August 1993 issue of Telescope, the magazine of the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. He also gave me a copy of the report done for the 1989 archeological excavation done on the ship by Tidewater Research Associates.
According to John, NO. 57 and her sister ships NO. 55 and NO. 56 were an innovation in lightship design. All previous lightships had no propulsion system. They were towed to and from their assigned station. NO.s 55, 56, and 57 were provided with their own steam boilers, engine, and propellor.
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As John’s article says, “An unintended consequence of self-propulsion occurred on the 17th of November, 1891, when the crew left station without orders, putting in at Cheboygan, Michigan, where they were fired for dereliction of duty.” After arriving at Cheboygan, the ship was found to be in bad shape and many repairs and modifications were made to it. NO. 57 served without further incident until September 1922 when the ship was condemned but not retired. In the spring of 1923, she was taken to the Milwaukee Lighthouse Depot for boiler repairs. The $630 repair estimate was thought to be too expensive for a 32 year old ship, so the ship was stripped of all valuables and used as a barge, being removed from government service in 1924.
John’s Telescope article quoted Roy Ance, the son of NO. 57’s last captain Peter Ance. Roy recalled that the steering wheel on the ship was open, not in an enclosed pilot house. He remembered seeing his father bring the ship into harbor wearing a long coat so covered in ice that they had to chop the ice away so that his father could leave the wheel. Roy said that he steered the ship across Lake Michigan on the Charlevoix, Michigan to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin leg of its last voyage. He recalled this ship being under powered, “and to steer that son of a gun, there was no aid, it was a hand crank. I had to stand on the spokes and pull it.”
In 1924 she was sold for $465 to Louis Harris, a Milwaukee scrap dealer. According to a 1926 story in The Milwaukee Journal, Harris “removed the pig iron and sold it with all else removable and salable.” She was moored in a slip at First and Canal Streets. Eventually, in 1928 her remains were moved to Milwaukee’s South Shore Beach where they were purchased for use as a clubhouse by a group called the “Unknowns,” according to a posting on the Bay View Historical Society Facebook page.
John stated that “The Unknown Pleasure Club” was simply a social club of young Bay View men who sold candy door to door and sponsored athletic contests to raise money to buy the hulk of NO. 57 to use as a club house in an effort to establish an alternative to the South Shore Yacht Club. In 1928 they purchased NO. 57 for $100 and had it towed to Milwaukee’s lakefront just north of the South Shore Yacht Club.
The Unknown’s alternate yacht club lasted for about a year until a storm in October 1929 wrecked the clubhouse, sinking the hull. John recalled “in the early 1950s, when the water level was low, on a calm day one could see the timber frame outline of a large ship below the water. I remember that she lay north/south, was perhaps 100 feet long, and had a big prop at one end.”
John recalled that one winter in the 1950s the water was so low that one of the blades of the prop stuck up above the surface of the lake through the ice. He said that someone then cut the prop off and placed it on display on the east side of the South Shore Yacht Club where it remains today, everybody having forgotten where it came from.
The archeological report states, “In anticipation of the construction of a stone shore revetment along Lake Michigan at South Shore Park, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District contracted with Tidewater Atlantic Research to conduct a submerged cultural resource survey of the project area.”
The archeologists confirmed John Ebersol’s memory by finding “wreck material is scattered over an area extending 120 feet offshore by 180 feet south.” The wreck was found to be in three main pieces: “the main wreck feature is 90 feet long and is lying against the shoreline almost completely buried in fill material. An intact 50 foot long section of the starboard side of the ship is situated 32 feet off shore and north of the main wreck. The third major feature is a 28 foot section of hull that is located 100 feet offshore and north of the main wreck.”
The archeologists verified that the wreck was that of lightship NO. 57. The area was later covered in gravel fill and now forms Cupertino Park. Today joggers and bicycle riders travel right over the site of the old lightship. Patrons of the South Shore Yacht Club walk right past its old propeller every day.
John Ebersol had another connection to the lightship. The grandfather of his friend Bob Hansen was a commercial fisherman who bought the “squirrel cage” light fixture from the top of the foremast of sister lightship NO. 55 to use as a live bait holding facility.
And while a ship that doesn’t go anywhere might not seem like an ideal setting for either a novel or a crime movie, The Lightship is a 1985 American drama film starring Klaus Maria Brandauer and Robert Duvall. The film is based on the novella “Das Feuerschiff” (“The Lightship”) by German author Siegfried Lenz. It had previously been made into a 1963 German film of the same title.
On December 16, 1996, the ship’s remains were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In November 2018, the Sprecher Brewery of Glendale, Wisconsin, released a beer named after the light vessel – Lightship 57.
Hey, it’s Milwaukee. We commemorate everything with beer.
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Photo at top of page: The Unknowns aboard their clubhouse about 1928.
Bottom: No. 57 being repaired in 1901. Photo Credit: courtesy of John Ebersol.
More photos:
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Sources:
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Vessel_No.57
Wisconsin Marine Historical Society
https://wmhs.org/blog_post/floating-lighthouses-guided-mariners-for-centuries/
Grays Reef Light
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grays_Reef_Light
Bay View Historical Society Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/BayViewHistoricalSociety/
Wisconsin Shipwrecks
https://www.wisconsinshipwrecks.org/Vessel/Details/376
Bay View Vintage Wisconsin
https://m.facebook.com/groups/590996504349553/permalink/2523218697793981/
Telescope Magazine Volume XLI: Number 4 for July/August 1993 pages 87-91.
Light Vessel #57: A Report on Phase II Identification and Assessment for National Register of Historic Places Eligibility, October 1989 Tidewater Atlantic Research, Washington NC
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.
