On a pier by the Chicago River on July 24, 1915, as passengers were preparing to board the steamship SS Eastland, the concern of chief engineer Joseph Erickson grew increasingly about the ship’s behavior. While the long line of passengers crossed the gangway, the engine room crew filled the ballast tanks with water to keep the ship level because it had a tendency to list to one side or the other.
The hundreds of passengers were employees of the Western Electric Company and were headed to the city of Michigan in Indiana, across the lake for the company picnic. The annual event was usually festive and full of celebration, so the ship was packed with excited families and abundant picnic baskets. When the ship reached its capacity of 2,500, the ship’s orchestra arrived, and although the list began to increase and the crowd grew congested, everyone continued dancing indifferently.
Chief engineer Joseph Erickson had been hired just a few months earlier but was familiar with the ship’s history and other similar incidents. The listing issue was usually resolved by pumping or transferring ballast from right to left or vice versa, so his concern may not have been that great. However, the Eastland’s crew, unfortunately, had not fully understood the implications of certain recent modifications to their ship. The ship’s owners had recently added weight to the upper decks, including additional lifeboats and several dozen tons of concrete to reinforce the deck. All these alterations had significantly shifted the ship’s center of gravity.
In the engine room, Erickson continued efforts to reduce the list. Fearing the ship—due to the list—was touching the pier, he sent a crew member to inspect the ship’s outer side (starboard). In the following minutes, after filling the two starboard ballast tanks, the ship had reached a level state. With the situation seemingly resolved, Captain Harry Pedersen gave the order to begin preparations for departure. The baggage master loosened the stern line, while a crowd of passengers gathered on the ship’s starboard rail to wave goodbye to those on the pier.
The moment the engines began pushing the ship forward, it once again started to list. Water began entering the ship through the portholes, and the harbormaster alerted the first mate to stop and not release the remaining lines until the listing issue was corrected. However, the ship’s stern began moving away from the pier, and the list increased to 30 degrees!
The orchestra, sensing the danger, began playing cheerful music in an attempt to calm the passengers, while at the same time the engine crew, recognizing the peril, rushed to the deck heading for the exit. As the list reached an alarming degree, plates began falling from shelves and tables started sliding. The captain, who was on the upper deck, shouted to a crew member: “For God’s sake, open the gangway!” Panicked passengers began jumping from the deck into the river and onto the pier.
The cheerful music of the orchestra was replaced by cries of “every man for himself!” As the influx of water continued to increase the tilt to the left side, and passengers ran toward the right, the abrupt redistribution of weight quickly pushed the vessel to its critical point. At 7:28 a.m., the sudden but sharp shift of passengers to the right side caused the ship to “lose its stability and capsize” to the right.
Author Jack Woodford witnessed the scene from the shore:
“And then movement caught my attention. I looked across the river. Like a fool, I saw a large steamship, like an ocean liner, slowly leaning to one side as if it were a whale tilting to take its nap. I couldn’t believe that a massive steamship had done this before my eyes, tied to a dock, in perfectly calm waters, under excellent weather conditions, without an explosion, without fire, nothing! I thought I had gone mad.”
Passengers on the upper deck fell into the river, many of them rolling beneath the hull of the wrecked ship. Inside, passengers in the living quarters were crushed by refrigerators, pianos, and other equipment, as well as by other passengers who, panicked by the influx of water, trampled them in their rush.
As the Eastland “settled” to the riverbed, everyone on the dock stood stunned, watching the event, until they began throwing anything that could float so passengers could grab hold and be saved. At the same time, a tugboat near the scene approached the Eastland and began rescuing passengers—some from the water and others from the wrecked ship itself.
In the engine room, Chief Engineer Erickson managed to cool the boilers by bringing in cold water to reduce the risk of an explosion. He then escaped the engine room through an air vent and a porthole, where crew members waiting for him helped them all flee to safety.
There are many testimonies from surviving passengers describing the chaotic conditions at that moment. Many of them also state with certainty that had they been in the dance hall, they would hardly have escaped. The screams of desperate people—pleading to be saved—were chilling. Nearly the entire river was covered with people trying to grab onto something to survive.
Very soon, rescuers began cutting through the ship’s hull plating to enter it. Dozens of screams were heard inside, but unfortunately, by the time rescuers managed to open holes in the plating, many had already died. Few were found alive, even though rescuers searched every part of the ship desperately for any sign of life.
Morgues were established in many of the surrounding buildings so that the victims could be identified by their families. Divers needed several days to manage to extricate and collect the victims from the tragic shipwreck. Many employees of the company, however, had taken their entire families along for the picnic, and unfortunately, there were many cases where no member survived. A total of 844 souls were lost in the Eastland disaster, including 472 women, 290 children, and 82 men. Only four members of the ship’s crew were killed.
In the churches and cemeteries of Chicago, there was crowding due to the funerals, and even refrigerated trucks were needed to transport the dead en masse. Many of the survivors had to receive typhoid vaccinations due to the prolonged burials of their coworkers and the contact they had with them.
Shortly afterward, many of the Eastland’s crew were arrested and interrogated in response to public outcry demanding an explanation. As Captain Pedersen and the first mate were being taken to the city hall, the angry crowd that had gathered attempted to attack the two men. One man from the crowd managed to punch the captain in the face before the police intervened. During the subsequent investigation, it was determined that the Eastland’s crew had done nothing to be held responsible for before or during the disaster, nor was the accident a result of their actions. The U.S. District Court also found that the owners of the Eastland—the Steamship Company—bore no responsibility for any of the deaths resulting from the Eastland shipwreck. While legal disputes continued later, no criminal charges were brought against anyone.
The “slow reaction” of the Eastland in correcting its stability through the use of ballast certainly contributed to its capsizing, but the primary cause of its overturning was ultimately the poor distribution of its weight. In the aftermath of the 1912 Titanic disaster, the U.S. federal government had enacted the LaFollette Seamen’s Act, which stipulated that passenger ships must carry an adequate number of lifeboats on deck. Ironically, in compliance with this regulation, the owners of the Eastland had ordered lifeboats, weighing 10–14 tons, to be placed on their already heavy ship. This move shifted the center of gravity higher, thereby reducing stability.
In October 1915—three months after its tragic sinking in the river—the pieces of the Eastland were put up for sale at the Illinois Naval Station. The Navy restored the ship’s seaworthiness and renamed it the USS Wilmette. It was used as a training warship in the Great Lakes region for another thirty-two years until it was decommissioned and scrapped in 1947.
The Eastland disaster was one of the deadliest accidents to occur in the U.S. throughout the entire twentieth century, yet its story remains shrouded in darkness…
