LADY ELGIN
Winnetka
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Read about the wreck of the steamer Lady Elgin.
Read a September r1892 article from the Milwaukee Sentinel about the loss of the Lady Elgin.
In 1989, in the waters of Lake Michigan near Highwood, Illinois, divers found what they had been seeking for decades: the wreckage of the Lady Elgin, a passenger steamship that had gone down 10 miles south of that spot nearly 130 years before.
On a stormy night in 1860, the Lady Elgin, which was owned by Gurdon Hubbard, sailed from Chicago for Milwaukee with nearly 700 passengers on board.
The Lady Elgin probably would have made it to Milwaukee but for the inexplicable behavior of another craft in the water that night – the schooner Augusta. Despite gale-force winds, the Augusta, an unlighted two-master overloaded with lumber, was under full sail. She rammed the Lady Elgin broadside beneath the water line at top speed. It might as well have been a torpedo hit.
Within 20 minutes, the Lady Elgin disintegrated, leaving hundreds of desperate passengers floating in heavy seas. Many clung to bits of wreckage through the night, only to have a powerful undertow claim their lives as they neared shore at dawn. Some were saved through the bravery of Edward Spencer, a Northwestern University student who kept going back to rescue people until he became delirious.
But in the end, only 160 lives were saved.
As for the Augusta, her captain was threatened with lynching when he returned to port, but he lived to sail another day – only to meet a watery grave in the lake himself a few years later.