Somehow, time
has silted over the Eastland disaster.
Successive layers of Chicago history have settled over the
Eastland's story, obscuring an accident that drowned 844 men,
women and children when the overloaded and unstable excursion
steamer rolled in the Chicago River in 1915.
Though the Eastland disaster killed more than three times
as many people as did the Great Chicago Fire and remains one
of America's worst maritime accidents, the city's historical
institutions have largely ignored it.
But amateur historians, some driven by personal connections
to the tragedy, are working to raise the Eastland from its
resting place in historical obscurity.
A group of divers from the Underwater Archaeological
Society of Chicago is preparing to mount what it believes is
the first organized search for Eastland artifacts that might
be embedded in the river mud. The divers feel compelled to
try, even though they hold out little hope that they will find
anything.
Others are trying to resurrect artifacts of a different
sort: the stories of the dead and the memories of the
survivors and their heroes.
All are driven by the sense that this tragedy, more than
others, was somehow allowed to slip from the city's
consciousness and that more of the Eastland story was being
lost with each passing year.
On Dec. 12, after the river has shaken off most of its boat
traffic, a team of divers will begin to work the river bottom.
"To tell you the truth, I don't expect to find anything
there," said Sam Frank, a diver helping coordinate the search.
"But just on the outside chance. . . . We figure it is better
to try it than to say, `What if?' "
It is almost inconceivable that any relics of the 1915
Eastland disaster could still lie on the bottom of the Chicago
River.
The boat itself was righted, pumped dry and towed to a
shipyard, where it was ultimately reconfigured as the
Wilmette, a Navy training vessel that plied the Great Lakes
until it was decommissioned and scrapped after World War II.
In the meantime, river currents and dredging buckets
sculpted and resculpted the bottom near the Clark Street
bridge where the steamer rolled, drowning passengers setting
sail for a Western Electric Co. picnic in Michigan City, Ind.
The divers know this better than anybody. But they intend
to look anyway because they have been swept up in the same
sorrowful wake that has drawn other amateurs to the disaster.
The Chicago Historical Society has never mounted even a
small exhibition devoted to Chicago's deadliest disaster,
largely because the museum has just a few artifacts, a
spokesman said.
But a nursery owner in DuPage County operates his Eastland
Disaster Museum on Saturdays in a Wheaton mall, having spent
27 years collecting artifacts on his own. And a family in
Arlington Heights recently founded the Eastland Disaster
Historical Society.
Until some conscientious high school students from the
Illinois Math & Science Academy erected a plaque at the
site in 1990, there was no commemoration for the disaster
whatsoever.
"While still partially tied to its dock at the river's
edge," the plaque reads, "the excursion steamer Eastland
rolled over on the morning of July 24, 1915. The result was
one of the worst maritime disasters in American history. . .
."
The ship had a history of instability and had nearly
capsized on several lake journeys after it was christened in
1903.
Ironically, the Eastland was also made top-heavy by the
addition of several lifeboats and rafts on its top deck, a
government requirement following the 1912 sinking of the
Titanic.
As passengers crowded on the port side to look at the other
boats, a worker struggled to adjust the ballast below. Just as
the boat shoved off from the wharf at 7:25 a.m., the boat
slowly rolled over--as slow as an egg rolling in boiling
water, one witness said--settling into the mud on the river
bottom.
At least 844 people drowned in the river, just a few feet
from shore, or in the flooded lower decks of the boat.
Now, the living memories of the event are washing away too.
It is now with decreasing frequency that the obituary pages of
Chicago newspapers recap a life that includes a sentence that
reads "one of the last survivors of the Eastland disaster." By
one count there is still one remaining survivor; by another
count, there are five.
Just as the archeological divers plan to look through the
accumulated sediment to find physical artifacts, the Eastland
Disaster Historical Society members are trying to recover
memories.
It was after hearing a presentation from the society that
the divers began thinking about searching in the river.
The descendants of Borghild Aanstad Decker Carlson formed
the society after their grandmother died.
She was 13 when she climbed aboard the Eastland with her
uncle, her sister and mother, who immediately said she didn't
like the way the boat was listing.
Carlson spoke about the tragedy often, telling how they
went into the water and her uncle somehow grabbed her, and how
after they got out of the river they became separated from her
sister in the chaos on the dock. All four members of the
family survived.
Her granddaughters never wrote down her story as she told
it. They never put a microphone before her or sat her in front
of a video camera to recount that day, even though an
occasional newspaper or television reporter did just that.
When Carlson died in 1991, much of the story about her
small part in the Eastland tragedy went with her.
Just as the divers could say that 84 years is too long for
any artifact to survive in the river, so could Carlson's
descendants have said it was too late to begin collecting
memories.
"We felt that with each passing generation, more and more
of these stories were being lost," said Ted Wachholz, who
married one of Carlson's granddaughters, Barbara.
"We are trying to gather as much of the history as we can--
not about the boat, but about the families."
The stories have begun to surface once again through the
society's Internet site (www.eastlanddisaster.org).
Anna Eicholz's memories, passed through her daughter, are
there: seeing babies in buggies in the water, and going under
herself, thinking it was a peaceful way to die, before she
grabbed a rope and was saved.
A family has lent the society a yellowed photograph of a
3-year-old girl who had been aboard, and a shaking hand--was
it an old hand, perhaps a grandmother's hand?--had later
scrawled the word "rescued" beneath it.
Another family has lent the society a man's wallet, the
personal effects collected by the man's relatives at the
temporary morgue. The papers, bearing the name Wm. Guenther,
are water-stained.
Artifacts, even the most mundane items, become potent
storytellers when they have been touched by disaster.
Dave Nelson, who operates the Eastland Disaster Museum, has
collected many artifacts over the years, including a sugar
bowl.
After the Eastland rolled, divers came in to search for
bodies and raise the boat from the mud. For weeks, the workers
ate their meals aboard the wrecking steamer Favorite, and one
of the divers retrieved a sugar bowl from the Eastland and
gave it to the cook as a gift.
She held onto it for 60 years, and in her old age began
looking for a place to have it displayed. After she died, a
friend donated it to Nelson's museum.
"If you bury this history, everything will be
forgotten--not just the people who died, but the heroes,"
Nelson said.
His grandfather was one of those heroes, a welder who
rushed to the wharf and cut open the hull of the ship with a
torch to free those trapped inside.
What if the river mud still held an object imbued with the
power to tell some fragment of the Eastland story?
"The Eastland didn't sink, but when it rolled over, stuff
must have fallen off of it," said diver Sam Frank.
The river has been dredged, including as recently as 1986,
according to records at the Chicago office of the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers.
In 1927, a three-paragraph article in the Tribune began:
"Tragic reminders of the Eastland disaster in which more than
800 picnickers were drowned in the river twelve years ago,
were dragged from the bottom of the river yesterday by a
dredge at the site of the disaster. Among the articles scraped
up are a gold bracelet, a child's locket and a purse
containing 80 cents."
That does not deter the archeological divers, though.
They point out that there is no record of anybody making a
visual inspection of the bottom, running gloved hands through
silt at the wall of the river or eyeballing spots that might
have been missed by dredging.
And just as currents can deposit sediment, they can wash it
away, exposing things that had long been buried.
Two hard-hat salvage divers, their air supplied from above,
will work through the sediment close to the wall.
Other divers will be in the river, working west to east so
that the river's very slight current will carry the stirred-up
clouds of silt away from where they are looking, Frank said.
The divers will also use a hand-held metal detector.
Harry Zych, who found the Lady Elgin shipwreck in Lake
Michigan, said he has never heard of any divers looking for
Eastland artifacts, primarily because there's almost no hope
of finding any.
A reasonable search, Zych said, would not be made with
divers and hand-held metal detectors, but with high-tech,
low-frequency sonar devices that can peer deep into the mud.
"They have good intentions, but on this one, they are
spinning their wheels if they don't use the right equipment,"
Zych said. "It would take a bunch of money and equipment to do
it right, and their wallets aren't deep enough."
"We aren't expecting much to come of it," said Wachholz,
who plans on being at the river in December to watch the
operation.
"But what if there are some personal items, like watches or
wallets, keys or key rings. Who knows what might be down
there?"
