Paradise, Michigan - Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum

The director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum wants to build a memorial to the more than 30,000 people who've drowned in the shipwrecks that his museum commemorates. It makes us wonder why anyone would get in a boat up here, especially when attractions along the shoreline -- including The World's Largest Grandfather Clock (Kewaunee, WI), the Shrine Of The Snowshoe Priest (L'Anse, MI), and the Sandpaper Museum (Two Rivers, MN) -- are so easily accessible by car.

The museum itself is a vehicle for public enlightenment, since most Americans only know about one Great Lakes tragedy, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and only because Gordon Lightfoot wrote an inexplicably popular song about it in the 1970s. While we applaud any effort to remove Gordon Lightfoot as an arbiter of history, we should also point out that the star exhibit at this museum is the bell from that same Edmund Fitzgerald, dragged up from the bottom of Lake Superior in 1995.

We imagined that a museum with a name like this (and in a place so remote) would be ancient and dusty, maybe with a skeleton or two displayed in fish-eaten clothes. But the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum opened in 1986 and, according to its director, has no skeletons. It does have photos and artifacts from many different shipwrecks. Its most popular exhibits, aside from the bell, are a Fresnel lens from a lighthouse and a "to-spec" wooden lifesaving boat. [Roadsideamerica.com Team, 09/01/2005]

Concerning the ship's bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald: The bell was placed at the museum at the request of the families of the crew members. Originally the 'Fitz was safe from disturbance due to the depth at which it came to rest; the only visitors were accident investigators operating remotes from the surface. Then technological advances made it possible for weekend divers to actually get down to the wreck. The families became upset when divers started bringing up souvenirs -- the wreck is the grave of their loved ones. At the request of the families, Canada (it's in Canadian waters) made the site off limits. Still the divers came. So when a scientific group wanted to go down to the wreck to find out once and for all why it sank (still unknown), the families helped them obtain permission from Canada. The only conditions were that the expedition be widely publicized as the last authorized visit to the wreck and that the ship's bell be brought back up for display at the museum. The hope was that this would finally end the illegal dives. It seems to have worked. Not to be left out: The families had a replacement bell placed on the wreck identical to the original with the addition of the names of those that had died that November night.

BTW, if you don't like Gordon Lightfoot's song, I would recommend not being in the UP of MI on the anniversary of the sinking. [Thomas M. Beaudry, 06/06/2004]