TOLEDO, Ohio — Nearly 50 years after the Edmund Fitzgerald vanished on Lake Superior, another Great Lakes giant — right here in Toledo — continues to tell its story.
The Col. James M. Schoonmaker, now a museum ship docked at the National Museum of the Great Lakes, once sailed the same routes as the Fitzgerald and carried the same type of iron ore that fueled the Midwest’s industrial rise.
Two ships, one shared legacy
“The biggest similarity,” said Christopher Gillcrist, director emeritus of the National Museum of the Great Lakes, “is that Great Lakes freighters from about 1905 until the 1980s were basically built along the same design.”
Launched in 1911, the Schoonmaker was constructed with a riveted steel hull — an earlier technique compared to the Fitzgerald’s welded design — but both ships reflected the same powerful silhouette that defined the 20th-century shipping era…