Hazards of the Inland Sea
A Hyde Park History Post
A yacht ran aground on Morgan Shoal yesterday, calling out rescue boats, fire engines, a helicopter, and a scuba team, though the motorboat just perched, listing, on the rocks and no one was injured. It reminded me about Hyde Park’s encounters with shipwrecks.
Hyde Park is beloved for its coastline. Originally, most of it was sand dunes, sifting ever southward, pushed by currents and winds. The basic idea can still be seen in Indiana in the Dunes National Park.
In 1860, this basic interaction of wind, water, and shore brought evidence of a tragedy to Hyde Park. The worst wreck in Lake Michigan’s open water was the sinking of the Lady Elgin1 off Highland Park, north of the city.2
At night, a schooner crashed into the brightly lit passenger boat’s side. The schooner, relatively unhurt, sailed on, thinking the Lady Elgin was also unhurt. It had, however, left a gaping hole below the water line. Many were saved, including a musician from the German brass band who had used his bass drum as a float, but over 300 people drowned. For several months, fishermen found bodies washed up along the very sparsely populated Hyde Park shore, 35 miles to the south. The newspaper in a vain hope of identifying them gave details of what clothes and jewelry remained.
It moved Henry Clay Work, who had moved to Hyde Park in 1860, to write a song, "Lost on the Lady Elgin." He’s not well-known now, but he wrote many songs supporting the Union during the Civil War and a song I still know the words to, ”Grandfather’s Clock.” Work’s house, the oldest in Hyde Park, still stands, though it’s now hidden behind a much later addition at 5317 S. Dorchester, behind the Sophy Hotel.
Paul Cornell, the founder of Hyde Park, had built his hotel on the shore at 53rd Street in 1859. The guests had several encounters with maritime disasters. The worst was the wreck of the schooner Gertrude, which ran aground in an autumn storm north of the hotel. The manager of the hotel George Kimbark and the guests ran out to the shore to haul the crew, trapped and exhausted on the boat as it was breaking up, to safety. Kimbark put them up in the billiard room, gave them brandy and a hot meal, and found them dry clothes from among the guests. It’s not clear where the Gertrude ran aground, but it was obvious that the speeding motorboat that ran aground last Saturday got stuck on Morgan Shoal, a striking (pun intended) unique feature of the Hyde Park shoreline.
Although most Chicago bedrock lies 80 feet below the surface, there are two places where a fossilized Silurian coral reef rises toward the surface. In Jackson Park, it is usually above the water.
I wrote about it, and Olmsted’s use of it, here.
Near 48th Street, the reef is usually underwater. The original lake shore was just east of the railroad tracks (the straight diagonal line moving to from the bottom center to the top left in the map). With time and landfill, the shore stretched out to the shoal.
The “shoal” in its name refers to the fact it’s a shallow submerged reef. The “Morgan” it its name refer to James Morgan, who, around 1871, bought a small house on a bit of sand just east of the tracks on the original shore. He built himself a series of piers near 51st Street. There were a number of piers along Hyde Park because boats were a main form of transportation, but Morgan had alternative motives. He designed his piers to capture the sand drifting south along the lakefront, building up his property, just to the south of Morgan Shoal. To help the process, he dredged sand from south of his pier and dump it to the north. By 1892, his original small plot had grown to 12 acres, big enough to lease to the builders of the luxurious Chicago Beach Hotel.
The shoals are a complex ecosystem that has been recently studied.3
A winter survey in 2016 found fifteen species of fish, many of them threatened. There were larger than expected lake trout plus yellow perch, rusty crayish, isopods, and a freshwater sponge.
Part of the Morgan Shoal ecosystem is a piece of the boiler from the Silver Spray, a wreck that was more farce than tragedy. The Silver Spray was a 109-foot wooden passenger steamer that had been hired to take 200 University of Chicago students on a tour of the Gary, Indiana steel mills on July 15, 1914. This was before Promontory Point was constructed, so the steamer was cutting in to pick up the students on the 59th Street pier, didn’t pay attention, and ran aground. The Jackson Park life-saving station offered to rescue the crew, but the crew couldn’t believe that they couldn’t get the ship off the shoal. The Jackson Park life-saving power boat and two recreational boats tried to dislodge it to no avail. As night set in, the crew got in the lifeboat and rowed to shore. After a tug failed over the next couple of days to budge it, they unloaded twenty tons of coal, which unbalanced the ship. It rolled over and the surf broke it apart. The iron boiler fell down to the shoal while wood washed ashore, to the delight of onlookers, who proceeded to turn it into bonfires for a huge party that the police had to break up. According to the Hyde Park Herald, life preservers with Silver Spray stamped on them were a popular souvenir.
Even though it was a fiasco, unlike the Lady Elgin, the Silver Spray also lives on in verse as witnessed by these pages from the University of Chicago Cap and Gown from 1915, a dream sequence about "hitting a bar”—involving very little water and a lot of beer.
The worst shipwreck in Chicago was the Eastland disaster that killed 844 people when the excursion ship rolled over on its side in the Chicago River.
Really interesting! Thank you!
I've known about Morgan Shoal, but not such in-depth history. Thanks, Patricia!