Alpena (ship)
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The Alpena was an American paddle steamer that disappeared without a trace on October 16, 1880, with passengers and cargo on its way to Chicago , in a violent storm that went down in American history as "The Big Blow" . Nobody on board survived; the exact circumstances of the accident remained in the dark. It has not yet been found.
The ship
The 60 m long wooden paddle steamer Alpena was built in 1866 by Thomas Arnold of Gallagher & Company in Marine City ( Michigan ). It was intended for the transport of passengers and cargo on Lake Michigan . The Alpena was originally built for Gardner, Ward & Gallagher, but was taken over in April 1868 by the shipping company Goodrich Line, newly founded by Albert Edgar Goodrich.
The wooden ship was powered by a single-cylinder steam engine and had a paddle wheel with a diameter of 7.3 m on each side . In the winter of 1875/76 the ship was given a general overhaul in Manitowoc .
The disappearance
On Friday, October 15, 1880 at 9:30 p.m., the Alpena left Grand Haven under the command of Captain Nelson W. Napier for another crossing to Chicago. On board were 80 passengers and crew members and a cargo of ten truckloads of apples . The weather on departure was clear, but the barometer was showing the first signs of an upcoming storm. On its south-westerly course, the Alpena was sighted by the steamer Muskegon at around 1 a.m. At this point everything was still fine.
At around 3am on October 16, one of the heaviest storms ever recorded in Lake Michigan history, known as The Big Blow, set in on the water. Large stretches of bank were affected by it. In the following hours the Alpena was seen several times, including at 8 a.m. by Captain George Boomsluiter on board his Bark City of Grand Haven . The ship struggled with the high waves about 35 miles from Kenosha .
After that the steamer was seen lying on its side by another ship, with one of the paddle wheels sticking out of the water. Then the track of the Alpena was lost . In the days that followed, currents and winds washed up numerous pieces of wreckage and debris near the city of Holland , including a piano. Hundreds of apples were floating in the surf at Saugatuck . A week after the disappearance, the washed-up wreckage had spread over a 20-mile radius on the west bank of Lake Michigan. The New York Times reports also of a lifeboat of Alpena ¸ which was found at Saugatuck.
The exact circumstances and the exact time of the sinking are not known. Since the clock of one of the recovered fatalities stopped at 10.15 a.m. on October 16, it was assumed that the ship sank around that time. There were no survivors and only a few bodies were found. The number of people on board could never be determined exactly because the passenger list went down with the ship. The Holland City News published a list of passengers and crew with 80 names, including some women and children. Most of the passengers were from Illinois and Michigan , but there were also passengers from Philadelphia , New York and a group of five Swedes on board.
The wreck of the Alpena has not yet been discovered. It was speculated, among other things, that the large quantity of apples that had been stored on the main deck tore themselves loose in the storm, shifted and capsized the ship .
Web links
- MSRA - The wreck of the Alpena The Alpena and its disappearance in detail ( Memento from August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- Alpina Die Alpena in the context of The Big Blow 1880
- THE LOST LAKE STEAMER. - MATERIAL FROM THE WRECKED ALPENA FLOATING ASHORE - SEARCHING THE SHORE FOR BODIES. - View Article - NYTimes.com - Reported in the New York Times, October 21, 1880
- THE LOSS OF THE ALPENA. - THREE BODIES FOUND AND IDENTIFIED-- THE STATEMENT FOUND NAILED TO A PIECE OF WRECK. - View Article - NYTimes.com - Reported in the New York Times, October 22, 1880