Great Lakes’ deadliest wreck: What brought down the Eastland

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — When people think of Great Lakes tragedies, several shipwrecks come to mind: the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Lady Elgin , maybe even The Nelson or the ships lost in the infamous November storm of 1913.

But depending on the flexibility of your definitions, the deadliest incident on the Great Lakes didn’t take place in the lakes at all, but rather on the Chicago River as a passenger boat named the SS Eastland prepared for a trip across Lake Michigan.

And it wasn’t the wind or the waves that brought the Eastland down. It was a mix of incompetence and greed.

THE EASTLAND

The Eastland was built by the Jenks Ship Building Company in Port Huron and was widely known as an outlier.

It was the only passenger ship ever designed by the company, known for making cargo ships and tugs. Some post-design changes to increase its speed made the Eastland top-heavy. It was notoriously unstable while loading and unloading cargo.

Commissioned in 1902, the Eastland already had several notable incidents before that fateful day on July 24, 1915 — 109 years ago Wednesday.

Shortly after pulling out of South Haven in July of 1904, with approximately 3,000 passengers on board, the boat started to list. According to the Eastland Memorial Society , the boat leaned to the port side by 12 to 15 degrees. The water ballast was adjusted to try to correct the list, which then shifted to the starboard side at approximately 20 to 25 degrees, the vessel now taking on water through the aft starboard gangways.

“After relocating the passengers, whose concentration on the starboard side of the ship had likely contributed to the listing problem and shifting the ballast again by adding water to the port tanks, the list was soon corrected,” a report states. “This incident occurred in full view of South Haven and the public was alarmed.”

Afterward, pinning the blame on passengers concentrating to one side of the ship, the Eastland’s capacity was reduced to 2,800. After another incident in 1906, with 2,530 passengers on board, the capacity was cut again.

The ship traded hands several times in the following years before being purchased by the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company in 1914. A couple of key decisions made by the new owners, who were considered novices in the industry, contributed at least partly to the Eastland’s demise.

For one, instead of replacing rotten wooden planks on one of the decks, they covered it with 50 tons of concrete, adding more weight.

Secondly, they needed to accommodate the newly passed Seaman’s Act of 1915 . That maritime law, passed following the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, imposed tighter regulations that demanded the Eastland do one of two things: cut its passenger capacity or add more lifeboats. In an effort to maximize profits, the owners chose to add more boats, which were stored on the top deck of the ship and became yet another factor threat to the boat’s delicate balance.

JULY 24, 1915

Thousands of people gathered along the Chicago River on the soggy morning of July 24, 1915. The Eastland was one of five ships chartered to take employees of the Western Electric Company — and their families — to Michigan City, Indiana, for a massive company picnic.

People were encouraged to get there bright and early and many rushed to get on the Eastland because it was the first ship of the day and would theoretically give them the most time at the event.

Before the first people boarded at approximately 6:30 a.m., Capt. Harry Pederson ordered the ballasts emptied to raise the entrances to help passengers board faster. That, however, forced the boat to sit much higher in the water, again putting more strain on its delicate balance.

With the gates open, ticket counters started helping people aboard, anywhere between 50 to 100 people a minute, quickly packing the boat. Notably, ticket takers were only counting tickets, not counting children, which means the ship certainly passed its legal limit of 2,500 passengers.

Unbeknownst to the soon-to-be victims, the weather also played a role. What had started as a misty morning had turned to rain. Instead of hanging out on the top decks, most passengers moved inside, packing the interior floors to escape the showers.

After about 10 minutes, the vessel started to list starboard. Historians say Pederson ordered his chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, to start filling the ballast on the opposite side to try and restore balance.

At 7:10 a.m., the counters hit 2,500 and stopped boarding. By 7:25 a.m., the boat had righted itself several times, but soon began to list to the port side at 25 degrees.

Ted Wachholz, of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society , said the crew assumed that the ship’s balance would get sorted out as they got moving, becoming more stable in motion like a bicycle.

“Once boarded and underway, with the ship moving, it becomes more of a stable situation, and I believe that the officers of the ship anticipated that once they boarded all the passengers for the picnic, once they got the ship on the way, they would be sailing rather smoothly,” Wachholz wrote.

They were wrong. Just moments after it moved away from the dock, around 7:30 a.m., the Eastland rolled away from the dock and tipped, settling on the riverbed in about 20 feet of water.

Immediately, onlookers, nearby boats and other passengers jumped into action, and police and fire departments rushed to the scene. The river was suddenly full of people struggling to survive in the water, not to mention those trapped inside the boat.

Some people dove into the wreckage to try to find survivors trapped in cabins that managed to hold an air supply. One, a 17-year-old named Charles Bowles who went by Reggie, became known as The Human Frog for the amount of time he spent in the water. Historians said Bowles could hold his breath for nearly three minutes and worked relentlessly to save people and, eventually, to recover bodies.

“Although Reggie was repeatedly warned, he dived into remote parts of the ship, rarely coming to the surface without a victim’s body. Throughout the day he labored and was on hand the next morning as soon as it was light enough for him again to enter the ship,” the EDHS wrote. “Several times first responders advised him to let others do the work, but Reggie was relentless until dusk. He was nearly unconscious from fatigue.”

A first responder had to force Bowles into a policeman’s car and take him away to the detective’s bureau. He was given hot coffee and a warm blanket and still insisted that he would go back after he got a little rest.

Bowles isn’t the only folk hero from the Eastland. Helen Repa worked for Western Electric as a nurse and took charge of the scene, making a makeshift med center at the dock.

“She knew they needed a place to be able to tend to the people who still had a chance. They needed a field hospital,” historian and author Patricia Sutton said in a Timeline documentary on the Eastland.

Repa convinced workers at a nearby warehouse to open up their space as a shelter and went to the nearest hospital to get help and supplies.

“There are people everywhere, they are in shock, and there are no blankets left. So, Helen said to one of the nurses, ‘Call Marshall Fields. We need 500 blankets right away, and bill that to Western Electric,’” Sutton said.

Repa wore a bright white uniform to the picnic. By the end of the day, after helping countless people, her dress was covered with blood stains and caked with mud.

THE AFTERMATH

Despite the efforts of Repa, Bowles and hundreds of others, 844 people still died — just yards from the dock.

Most of the recovered bodies were eventually brought to a nearby armory to serve as a makeshift morgue, where hordes of family and friends lined up to try to identify the victims.

The Chicago community was not prepared for the days that followed. Morticians were overwhelmed with work. There weren’t enough caskets in the city. Churches struggled to accommodate everyone. Some services honored more than two dozen people at a time and, in some cases, entire families who had perished on the ship.

The story quickly spread across the world, gripping not only Chicago, but many parts of Europe. The majority of Western Electric’s employees were immigrants, notably from Poland, Hungary and the present-day Czech Republic.

Local reporters jumped on several storylines, including the fate of “Little Feller” and the arrest of Capt. Pederson and members of his crew. Pederson was hauled away from the scene by police after interfering with welders who were trying to cut holes in the ship — more for his safety and to prevent a riot than anything else.

While still at the scene, Pederson made his feelings clear, saying, “I will not be the goat.”

“I think what Pederson meant by that is that there were those that deserve blame for this. And it’s not him and he’s not going to protect them,” Eastland historian and author Jay Bonansinga said in a Timeline documentary. “Pederson knew what the owners had done all in the name of profit.”

Within days, and pressure mounting from a furious community, investigations were launched by seven different agencies, including local police and the U.S. Commerce Department. But there was little in the way of justice.

Shortly after the incident — and with vastly different expedition procedures — Pederson and other Eastland officials fled to Michigan. The first federal indictment against the Eastland’s owners and officers fell flat. An Illinois judge ruled that the prosecutors did not provide nearly enough evidence to convict the six of manslaughter and criminal carelessness.

Instead, prosecutors were forced to file an indictment in Michigan, presenting a new hurdle. Clarence Sessions , the federal judge in Grand Rapids at the time, was known for siding with corporations. Also, instead of manslaughter and negligence, prosecutors filed conspiracy charges, which in hindsight were even harder to prove .

Western Electric also washed its hands of blame, claiming it was actually an employee group, not the company itself, that had chartered the ship.

Between criminal and civil complaints, it took more than 20 years to conclude all of the litigation tied to the Eastland disaster. When it was all said and done, none of the six officials from the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company spent any time in prison or paid any fines. The victims and their families saw little to no money in payouts.

It took more than two weeks for salvage crews to right the Eastland at a cost near the total value of the ship. Other creditors claimed what they could, leaving nothing for the victims or their families.

Two years after the incident, the Eastland was sold to the U.S. Navy and converted into a gunboat. The USS W i lmette never saw any combat but was used as a training vessel until 1945 when it was sold off for scrap.

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