The Ship That Never Left the Dock

The SS Eastland and the deadliest disaster in Great Lakes history

On the morning of July 24, 1915, a crowd of around 7,300 people gathered at the docks between LaSalle and Clark Street bridges on the Chicago River.

They were employees of Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works, a factory complex in the nearby town of Cicero, and their families. The company had chartered five steamers to carry them across Lake Michigan to Michigan City, Indiana, for the firm’s annual summer picnic; a day of parades, food, and sporting events that workers had been looking forward to for months. They had dressed for the occasion. A woman named Josephine Polivka arrived with her sisters, all three of them in white summer dresses.

The mood was festive. Bands played on the docks. The Eastland — the largest and most glamorous of the five chartered vessels — had been used for the same excursion the previous year without incident. An experienced captain, Harry Peterson, stood at the helm. Everything was in order.

By 7:30 that morning, 844 people were dead.

A troubled ship

The Eastland had never been an easy vessel to handle.

Built in 1902 to carry passengers for lake excursions, the ship had no keel and relied on poorly designed ballast tanks to maintain stability. It had a reputation, among those who knew it, for sitting awkwardly in the water, unstable when loading or unloading, manageable only once it was underway. A naval architect had examined it as recently as 1913 and warned, in writing, that unless structural defects were remedied to prevent listing, there may be a serious accident. The warning was noted, but nothing was done.

By 1915, the ship’s instability had been made significantly worse by a series of modifications, some well-intentioned. In the aftermath of the Titanic disaster three years earlier, a new federal law had required all passenger vessels to carry a full complement of lifeboats. The Eastland, which had been designed to carry six, was now carrying eleven lifeboats, thirty-seven life rafts, and enough life jackets for all 2,570 passengers and crew. Most of this additional weight sat on the upper decks. No tests were conducted to determine how it affected the ship’s stability. That same year, several tons of concrete had been laid to shore up rotting wood in the deck and floors.

The Eastland that arrived at the dock on July 24, 1915, was measurably more dangerous than the Eastland that had made the same run in 1914. The people boarding it had no reason to know this.

Seven minutes

At 6:41 that morning, with passengers still boarding, the Eastland began listing to starboard. The crew let water into the ballast tanks to correct the imbalance. The ship righted itself. Then it began listing again, this time to port.

Boarding continued. At 7:10 the ship reached its passenger limit of 2,500. The list had been corrected several times by this point and the crew believed that the problem would stabilise once the vessel was underway. At around 7:25 the ship began its final list to port. Within approximately two minutes it was leaning at least twenty-five degrees, and water was entering through the lower openings. Warehouse workers on the riverbank shouted warnings.

At 7:30, the Eastland rolled onto its side.

The ship came to rest on the muddy bottom of the Chicago River in twenty feet of water. Its bow was nineteen feet from the wharf. The river was not deep. The dock was right there. It made no difference. Passengers trapped in the lower decks had no warning and no time. Many were still sitting at breakfast tables. Others had moved to one side of the lower deck to wave at the crowds on the bank. When the ship rolled, they went with it.

The whole sequence, from the first fatal list to the ship lying on its side, took roughly seven minutes.

Who was on board

The majority of the Western Electric workforce were recent immigrants, and the passenger list of the Eastland reads like a record of early twentieth century Chicago: Polish, Czech, German, Slovak. Many had settled in Cicero specifically to work at the Hawthorne Works. Of the Czech passengers alone, 220 perished.

The disaster hit entire families at once. Seven members of the Sindelar family died together — George, the Western Electric foreman, his wife Josephine, and their five children, aged three to fifteen. Some families were nearly wiped out in a single morning. Entire streets in Cicero fell quiet.

On Wednesday, July 28 Chicago was a city of funerals. So many had been scheduled for that day that there were not enough hearses in the city. Marshall Field and Company provided thirty-nine trucks. Fifty-two gravediggers, working twelve-hour shifts, could not keep up with the demand. Nearly a hundred and fifty graves had to be dug at the Bohemian National Cemetery alone. By the end of that single day, almost seven hundred victims had been buried.

Aftermath

Rescuers cut through the hull with acetylene torches and pulled forty people out alive from air pockets in the upturned hull. The river was shallow enough that survivors could be reached relatively quickly. It was not quick enough for the 844 who did not survive.

The Eastland was raised from the river on August 14, 1915. It was sold to the United States Navy, converted into a gunboat, and renamed the USS Wilmette. It served as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was eventually scrapped after the Second World War. The ship never made it out of the Chicago River it had always known.

The legal aftermath was long and largely futile for the victims’ families. Criminal charges were brought against the ship’s owners and officers but did not result in convictions. A civil lawsuit stretched on for twenty years, eventually assigning blame to the chief engineer for failing to maintain the ballast system properly. The total payout to the families of 844 dead people was limited to the assessed value of the Eastland’s hull, then approximately $50,000. From that sum, the company that raised the ship had first claim, at around $35,000. What remained was divided among the bereaved.

Why it was forgotten

The Eastland killed more people in a single event than the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It killed more American passengers than the Titanic and the Lusitania combined. It happened in the middle of a city, in daylight, in front of hundreds of witnesses, in twenty feet of water.

It has been largely forgotten outside Chicago.

Part of the reason is geography. The disaster has no mythology attached to it. No vast ocean, no iceberg, no maritime heroism in a remote and terrible place. It happened at a dock, on a river, on a summer morning, to people who were going to a picnic. There is nothing in the story that lends itself to the kind of monument-building that disaster mythology requires.

Part of it is the victims themselves. The Western Electric workforce were working-class immigrants, not the first-class passengers of the Titanic, whose names and stories the newspapers had space and inclination to record in full. The Eastland victims were largely buried in the records of the communities they came from — in the Czech and Polish newspapers of Cicero, in church registers, in the accounts of people who did not speak English as a first language and whose grief did not translate into the national press.

And part of it, perhaps, is the nature of the cause. The Titanic hit an iceberg. There is something in that — a natural adversary, an indifferent cosmos, a scale of bad luck that feels almost worthy of the tragedy. The Eastland rolled over because the lifeboats added after the Titanic made it too heavy. Because warnings had been ignored for years. Because nobody tested the stability before loading 2,500 people onto a vessel they already knew was dangerous.

It is harder to build a mythology around that. But it is, in its way, the more instructive story.