Chicago has 327 years of boating history, and it's about time there was a place to show it off.
That's the passionate conviction of the Chicago Maritime Society, a group of sailors, boat lovers and history buffs who have quested 20 years for a museum to measure up to Chicago's past as a great port.
"Every little two-bit town on the Great Lakes has a maritime museum," but not Chicago, said Ralph Frese, who owns a canoe shop and is a student of birch bark craft and Chicago history.
"We're all set to go" for a museum; all that's needed is a site, said Deane Tank, a historian and a founder of the society, which will host a public exhibition of its collection April 27 at the Chicago Yacht Club, 400 E. Monroe.
The group is "about to hit the city up" with the idea that if a park were to succeed Meigs Field at Northerly Island, the Maritime Society should get a museum there, Tank said.
"We could fit out a very substantial museum in a couple of months," he said. Engineering studies have been done on converting the emergency services building at the airfield to a museum, and $1 million is pledged for the project, Tank said. But no proposals have been made to the city, and any probably would be premature. A city-state lease agreement for Meigs expires in 2002.
Meanwhile, the society's collection of 5,000 items is divided among warehouses and lodged at its 310 S. Racine headquarters on steel shelves, in a jumble of bags and cardboard boxes and a few display cases.
The pieces, donated by individuals, companies and institutions, track the eras when freighters, schooners, sidewheel paddleboats and steamers carried goods to and from the St. Lawrence Seaway, when everyday workers cooled off summers with weekend excursion boat trips on Lake Michigan, and when Chicago thrived as a lake port with access to the nation's interior via rivers and canals.
A new acquisition--a diving suit used after the excursion boat Eastland capsized in 1915 in the Chicago River--turned up on eBay, the Internet auction site. David Nelson, who has gathered more than 1,000 items relating to the Eastland, found the suit.
The Eastland tipped over while still at the dock on July 24, killing 812 people on their way to a Western Electric-sponsored outing.
Each shoe for the suit weighs 18 pounds, and the life belt is 90 pounds--a chain or rope could be hooked to the breastplate so a diver could be winched up after being weighted to descend into the water.
"They pumped air into the helmet by hand for breathing," using rubber hoses, Nelson said.
Other Eastland memorabilia join the 5,000 pictures, books, postcards, glass-plate negatives, model ships, rusting gear and other artifacts--such as the first radar ever on Lake Michigan--at the society's headquarters.
The society provides lectures, training in natural history and hosts school groups as well as individuals who want to visit its collection. Members help students with history projects that go all the way back to the French explorers.
"In the beginning, there was the canoe," said Frese, referring to the Chicago Portage or Mud Lake, the little wetland between the South Branch of the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River where Indian guides in 1673 taught French explorers a shortcut from the Mississippi to the Great Lakes.
"We were discovered by the canoe. All trade and commerce was carried on by canoe," Frese said.
