Posted on 07/20/2005 7:44:23 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
DULUTH -- For more than 90 years it was a secret Lake Superior wouldn't tell: the deep, dark place where it had entombed the 239-foot Great Lakes freighter Benjamin Noble and its crew of 20 men.
Its captain, 31-year-old John Eisenhardt of Milwaukee, worried in a letter to his sister that the vessel was overloaded, making it unstable, according to "Lake Superior Shipwrecks" by Julius F. Wolff. The trip was Eisenhardt's first as captain. It became his last.
As the vessel crossed Lake Superior, one of the worst spring storms ever to strike the big lake was gathering -- with winds of at least 64 miles per hour. From a distance, the captain of another vessel saw a smaller ship's lights disappear at about 3 a.m. By that afternoon, hatch covers, oars and other flotsam from the Noble were washing up on Minnesota Point in Duluth.
Last Halloween, wreck hunters Jerry Eliason and Randy Beebe of Duluth, Ken Merryman of Fridley and Kraig Smith of Rice Lake, Wis., were scanning the bottom about 10 miles off the shore near Two Harbors.
They were looking for the Robert Wallace, a wooden steamer that went down in 1902. They thought the structure their side-scan sonar detected half-buried in the muddy bottom more than 300 feet down was the Wallace.
But when they lowered an underwater camera, they discovered a hull made of steel, not wood. Then they caught glimpses of the cargo: steel rails.
In western Lake Superior, only one missing steel vessel was loaded with rails when it went down: the Benjamin Noble. Eliason considered the Noble the Holy Grail or Loch Ness monster of wrecks, half history, half legend, a hidden crypt for 20 men.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
That song is played all the time in Michigan. Goes along with Ted Nugent's "Fred Bear".
The Electic Fetus is a record store. The shop you're thinking of is (was) indeed Carlson's used bookstore, which is no longer in business.
Lightfoot was awesome in that song
That's a shame. Whenever I visited Duluth, I liked to spend an hour in this place. I'll bet the building is another antique store, right ?
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
True, it has to do with the freshwater vs saline.
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