![]() ![]() (It was a November gale that took down the 729-foot iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald on nearby Lake Superior over 40 years ago.)Īccording to the Great Lakes Historical Society, Lake Erie has at least 1,500 shipwrecks, many dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Of course, these are estimates only, as there are only about 270 confirmed sites, all carefully coordinated by several professional divers and groups. November gales are essentially blizzards on the lake, with waves sometimes as high as 35 feet and blinding squalls. The shipping season on Lake Erie is mainly from March to November, and November is always a question mark due to the unpredictable weather. ![]() This was how news travelled at the time-reports of disasters usually came from sea captains who had made it safely to port, who couldn’t risk their own ship and crew to save another. The schooner Stranger came in this morning and reports seeing a vessel about 12 miles up, 2 miles from the Canada shore, with three men clinging to the masts, which alone were visible above the water– heard their cries and screams.”. From an article in the New York Times, 1853: “A violent gale is blowing on Lake Erie. So much of this Lake Erie traffic set sail before the utility of modern radar or radios, which found vessels often caught up in intense gales, consumed by fires, or one-half of a collision, and more often than not, help was not a radio-call away. During Prohibition (1919-1933) great amounts of alcohol crossed Lake Erie from our rumrunning friends up in Canada there is a mansion south of Buffalo, NY with a walkout basement, still complete with smooth sloped concrete in addition to stairs, for easy and fast forwarding of crates of smugglers’ booze. The steamship, Walk in Water, built in Buffalo in 1818, was Lake Erie’s first passenger steamer, but its success paved the way for hundreds more to be built and put to work. Starting in the early 19 th century and lasting more than 100 years, passenger ships were a common sight on the Lake. In the 1840s, Lake Erie and all the Great Lakes became busy highways for moving wheat, corn, lumber, coal, iron ore and thousands of immigrants. It was the last time Lake Erie saw battle, but the traffic was about to increase drastically. During the war of 1812, Oliver Hazard Perry and his “Don’t Give Up the Ship” motto saw the defeat of a British fleet near Put-in-Bay, Ohio, cutting off critical British supply lines through the Great Lakes, and being considered a pivotal engagement of the war. Lake Erie may be the smallest by volume and shallowest of the Great Lakes, and the last to have been discovered, but it’s been doing its best over the past several hundreds of years to make up for these deficiencies. ![]()
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