SS Eastland

SS Eastland was an American Great Lakes passenger ship. On July 24, 1915, the ship capsized while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. In total, 844 passengers and crew were killed in what is, as of 2026, the largest loss of life from a shipwreck on the Great Lakes and the Chicago area.

After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy. After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

Construction

The ship was ordered in October 1902 by the Michigan Steamship Company and built by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan. The ship was originally meant to be named The City of South Haven, but a rival company, the Dunkley Williams Transportation Company, built a ship with the same name. A brief construction contest was held to determine who could use the name The City of South Haven. Dunkley Williams ultimately won. As a result the Michigan Steamship Company held another contest, asking anyone to submit a name for the ship. 565 proposals were ultimately sent in with suggestions like majestic or Hiawatha. The ship was named in May 1903, immediately before her inaugural voyage by a Mrs. David Reid of South Haven. It was named in such because it was built for the lands east of Chicago.

History

Early problems

On 27 July of her 1903 inaugural season, the ship struck the laid-up tugboat George W. Gardner, which sank at its dock at the Lake Street Bridge in Chicago. Eastland received only minor damage with no fatalities. When they refused to return to the fire hole, Captain John Pereue arrested the six men at gunpoint. Firemen George Lippen and Benjamin Myers, who were not a part of the group of six, stoked the fires until the ship reached harbor. Upon the ship's arrival in South Haven, the six men were taken to the town jail and charged with mutiny. Shortly thereafter, Captain Pereue was replaced. Even though the modifications increased the ship's speed, the reduced hull draft and extra weight mounted up high reduced the metacentric height and inherent stability as originally designed.

The federal Seamen's Act, championed by senator Robert LaFollette, had been passed in 1915 following the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels. but the bill was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Eastlands owners could choose to either maintain a reduced capacity or add lifeboats to increase capacity, and they elected to add lifeboats to qualify for a license to increase the ship's capacity to 2,570 passengers. Eastland was already so top-heavy that she had special restrictions concerning the number of passengers that could be carried. In June 1914, Eastland had again changed ownership, this time bought by the St. Joseph and Chicago Steamship Company, with captain Harry Pederson appointed the ship's master. In 1914, the company removed the old hardwood flooring of the forward dining room on the cabin level and replaced it with of concrete. It also added a layer of concrete near the aft gangway. This added 15–20 tons of weight.

thumb|upright=1.2|Postcard of the Eastland and Pederson; postmarked 24 July 1915

On the morning of 24 July, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets at about 6:30 a.m., and by 7:10 a.m., the ship had reached her capacity of 2,500 passengers. Many passengers were standing on the open upper decks when the ship began to list slightly to the port side (away from the wharf). The crew attempted to stabilize the ship by admitting water into her four ballast tanks, but to little avail. At 7:28 a.m., Eastland lurched sharply to port and then rolled completely onto her port side, coming to rest on the river bottom, only below the surface; barely half of the vessel was submerged. Many passengers had already moved below decks on the cool and damp morning to warm themselves before the departure. Consequently, hundreds were trapped inside by the water and the sudden rollover, and some were crushed by heavy furniture, including pianos, bookcases, and tables. The ship was only from the wharf. Captain John O'Meara and the crew of the nearby vessel Kenosha responded quickly by pulling alongside the hull to allow stranded passengers to leap to safety. Other notable heroes of the day included Peter Boyle, a deckhand from the SS Petoskey who drowned while saving passengers, and Helen Repa, a Western Electric nurse who commanded much of the rescue operation. However, 841 passengers and 2 crew members died. Many of the passengers on Eastland were immigrants, with large numbers from present-day Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. Many of the Czech immigrants had settled in Cicero; of the Czech passengers aboard, 220 perished in the disaster.

In the aftermath, the Western Electric Company provided $100,000 (equivalent to $ in ) to relief and recovery efforts of the family members of the victims.

Among those scheduled to be on Eastland was 20-year-old football player George Halas, later the coach and owner of the Chicago Bears and a founding member of the National Football League, who was delayed leaving for the dock and arrived after the ship had overturned. Halas's name was listed on the list of deceased in newspapers, but he was later revealed to be unharmed. His friend and future Bears executive Ralph Brizzolara and his brother were on the Eastland when she capsized but escaped through portholes. Despite rumors to the contrary, entertainer Jack Benny was neither aboard Eastland nor scheduled for the excursion.

The first known film footage of the recovery efforts was discovered and released in 2015.

Marion Eichholz (born July 12, 1912), the last known survivor, died on November 24, 2014, at the age of 102. She was three years old at the time of the disaster.

Media reports

Writer Jack Woodford witnessed the disaster and offered a first-hand account to the Herald and Examiner. In his autobiography, Woodford wrote:

Carl Sandburg, then known better as a journalist than as a poet, wrote an angry account for The International Socialist Review, accusing regulators of ignoring safety issues and claiming that many of the workers were aboard following company orders for a mandatory staged picnic. Sandburg also wrote a poem, "The Eastland", which contrasted the disaster with the mistreatment and poor health of the lower classes. Sandburg concluded the poem with a comparison: "I see a dozen Eastlands/Every morning on my way to work/And a dozen more going home at night." The poem was considered too harsh for publication when written, but was eventually published in a collection of poems in 1993.

Inquiry and indictments

A grand jury indicted the president and three other officers of the steamship company for manslaughter, and the ship's captain and engineer for criminal carelessness, and found that the disaster was caused by "conditions of instability" caused by overloading of passengers, mishandling of water ballast and the ship's faulty construction.

During hearings regarding the extradition of the men to Illinois for trial, principal witness Sidney Jenks, president of the company that built Eastland, testified that her first owners wanted a fast ship to transport fruit, and he designed one capable of reaching and carrying 500 passengers. Defense counsel Clarence Darrow asked whether Jenks had ever concerned himself with the potential conversion of the ship into a passenger steamer with a capacity of 2,500 or more passengers. Jenks replied, "I had no way of knowing the quantity of its business after it left our yards ... No, I did not worry about the Eastland." Jenks testified that a stability test of the ship was never performed, and stated that after tilting to an angle of 45° at launching, "it righted itself as straight as a church, satisfactorily demonstrating its stability."

The court refused extradition, holding that the evidence was too weak, with "barely a scintilla of proof" to establish probable cause to find the six guilty. The court reasoned that the four company officers were not aboard the ship, and that every act charged against the captain and engineer was performed in the ordinary course of business, "more consistent with innocence than with guilt." The court also reasoned that Eastland "was operated for years and carried thousands safely", and therefore the accused were justified in believing the ship to be seaworthy.

Photo gallery

File:Capsizing of the SS Eastland, as witnessed by Satterfield.jpg|Cartoonist Bob Satterfield witnessed the capsizing from the Clark Street Bridge, and sketched it for his syndicate

File:EastlandKenosha.jpg|Passengers being rescued from the hull of the Eastland by a tugboat.

File:Eastland Postcard - Police recover bodies from between decks.png|Victim recovered from the Eastland

File:Eastland Postcard - View of Eastland taken from Fire Tug in river.png|View of Eastland from fire tug.

File:Eastland disaster port side.jpg|Eastland being righted after the disaster.

File:Eastland 3.png|View of the Eastland rescue underway. From a post card

File:Eastland 1.png|alt=View of the Eastland on a postcard printed in|Postcard of Eastland. <small>"The Ill Fated Eastland, which turned turtle in the Chicago River, July 24, 1915, at 7:30 A.M., causing the death of over 1000 persons, mostly women and children."</small>

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Second life as USS Wilmette

thumb|USS Wilmette, c. 1918

After Eastland was raised on August 14, 1915, she was sold at auction to the Illinois Naval Reserve. She was converted to a gunboat, renamed Wilmette on February 20, 1918, and commissioned on 20 September 1918 under captain William B. Wells.

On June 7, 1921, Wilmette was tasked with sinking UC-97, a German U-boat surrendered to the United States after World War I. The guns of Wilmette were manned by gunner's mate J. O. Sabin, who had fired the first American cannon of World War I, and gunner's mate A. F. Anderson, the man who fired the first American torpedo of the war.

For the remainder of her 25-year career, the gunboat served as a training ship for naval reservists of the 9th, 10th and 11th Naval Districts. It made voyages along the shores of the Great Lakes carrying trainees assigned to her from the Naval Station Great Lakes. Wilmette was placed "out of commission, in service" on 15 February 1940.

On April 9, 1945, she was returned to full commission for a brief interval. Wilmette was decommissioned on November 28, 1945, and her name was deleted from the Navy list on 19 December 1945. During 1946, Wilmette was offered for sale. On October 31, 1946, she was sold to the Hyman Michaels Company for scrapping, which was completed in 1947.

In 2012, Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre produced a musical entitled Eastland: A New Musical, written by Andy White and scored by Ben Collins-Sussman and Andre Pluess.

The Eastland disaster is also pivotal to the story of one family told in the play/musical Failure: A Love Story, written by Philip Dawkins, which premiered in Chicago in 2012 at Victory Gardens Theater. The play premiered in Los Angeles on 24 July 2015, the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. The play was again staged in Chicago at the Oil Lamp Theater and was nominated for multiple awards.

In 2024, Chicago's Neo-Futurists produced a puppetry show based on the disaster entitled Switchboard.

Notes

References

External links

Eastland Disaster Historical Society
MaritimeQuest Eastland Photo Gallery
Chicago Tribune Photographs