SS Eastland

SS Eastland was a passenger ship that operated on the Great Lakes. It was built in 1903. On July 24, 1915, the vessel overturned while moored at a dock on the Chicago River. The disaster killed 844 people, including passengers and crew. As of 2026, this remains the deadliest shipwreck ever recorded on the Great Lakes and in the Chicago area.

Second life as USS Wilmette

After the capsizing, the ship was raised from the water and sold to the U.S. Navy. Following repairs and refitting, it was reclassified as a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. It served mainly as a training vessel on the Great Lakes and was broken up for scrap after World War II.

Construction

The ship was ordered in October 1902 by the Michigan Steamship Company and constructed by the Jenks Ship Building Company in Port Huron, Michigan. It was initially intended to be called The City of South Haven, but a rival company, the Dunkley Williams Transportation Company, launched a vessel with that same name. A short contest was held to decide which company could use the name The City of South Haven; Dunkley Williams won. In response, the Michigan Steamship Company held another contest, asking the public to submit a name.

A total of 565 proposals came in, including suggestions like Majestic and Hiawatha. The ship was finally named Eastland in May 1903, just before its first voyage, by a Mrs. David Reid of South Haven. The name was chosen because the vessel was built for service to the lands east of Chicago.

Early problems

On July 27, 1903, during its first season, the ship struck the laid-up tugboat George W. Gardner, which sank at its dock near the Lake Street Bridge in Chicago. The Eastland suffered only minor damage, and no one was killed.

Mutiny on the Eastland

On August 14, 1903, while sailing from Chicago to South Haven, Michigan, six firemen refused to stoke the ship’s boiler, claiming they had not received their potatoes for a meal. When they would not go back to the fire hole, Captain John Pereue arrested them at gunpoint. Two other firemen, George Lippen and Benjamin Myers, who were not part of the group, kept the fires going until the ship reached port.

Once in South Haven, the six men were put in the town jail and charged with mutiny. Captain Pereue was soon replaced. The charges against the mutineers were eventually dropped several months later.

Because the ship did not reach its target speed of 22 miles per hour (35 km/h; 19 knots) during its first season, and because its draft was too deep for the Black River in South Haven, where it was being loaded, the vessel returned to Port Huron in September 1903 for modifications. These included adding an air conditioning system, an induced-draft system for the boilers to increase power, and repositioning the machinery to reduce the hull’s draft. Although the changes boosted the ship’s speed, the reduced hull draft and the extra weight mounted high up lowered the originally designed metacentric height and made the vessel less stable.

When the Eastland returned to South Haven in May 1904, it easily won a race to Chicago against The City of South Haven. However, the ship kept having stability problems while loading and unloading cargo and passengers.

On July 17, 1904, it nearly capsized after leaving South Haven with about 3,000 passengers; fire hoses had to be used to keep order. After that, its capacity was cut to 2,800 passengers, cabins were removed, lifeboats were added, and the hull was repaired. On August 5, 1906, another listing incident occurred, leading to complaints against the Chicago–South Haven Line, which had bought the ship earlier that year.

Before the 1907 season, the ship was sold to the Lake Shore Navigation Company and moved to Lake Erie. In 1909, it was sold again to the Eastland Navigation Company and ran excursions between Cleveland and Cedar Point.

After the 1909 season, the remaining 39 cabins were removed, and before the 1912 season, the top sections of the smokestacks were cut off to shorten them. On July 1, 1912, another incident happened when the Eastland listed severely—about 25 degrees—while loading passengers in Cleveland. In June 1914, the ship was sold to the St. Joseph–Chicago Steamship Company and returned to Lake Michigan for service between St. Joseph, Michigan, and Chicago.

On July 24, 1915, the Eastland and four other Great Lakes passenger steamers—the Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Racine, and Rochester—were chartered to take employees from Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, to a picnic in Michigan City, Indiana.

The federal Seamen’s Act, pushed by Senator Robert LaFollette, had been passed in March 1915 after the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required that a full set of lifeboats be retrofitted on the Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels. This extra weight may have made the ship even more dangerous by making it more top-heavy.

Some argued that other Great Lakes ships would face the same problem, but the bill was still signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. The Eastland’s owners could either keep a reduced passenger capacity or add lifeboats to increase it; they chose to add lifeboats to qualify for a license that would raise the ship’s capacity to 2,570 passengers. The Eastland was already so top-heavy that it had special restrictions on how many passengers it could carry.

In June 1914, the ship had changed ownership again, bought by the St. Joseph and Chicago Steamship Company, with Captain Harry Pederson appointed as master. In 1914, the company removed the old hardwood flooring of the forward dining room on the cabin level and replaced it with 2 inches (51 mm) of concrete. It also added a layer of concrete near the aft gangway, adding 15–20 tons of weight high up.