Whitefish Point and the Edmund Fitzgerald

Whitefish Point reaches out into Lake Superior at the northeast corner of the Upper Peninsula, north of the village of Paradise, and it has watched over more shipwrecks than perhaps any other place on the lake. The waters off the point are known as the “Shipwreck Coast”: here the lake narrows into a funnel where shipping lanes converge, storms build over two hundred miles of open water, and more than two hundred vessels have gone down over the years. A lighthouse has stood at the point since 1849 — the oldest operating light on Lake Superior — guiding freighters toward the safety of Whitefish Bay.

Today the point is home to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, the only museum dedicated to the perils of Great Lakes shipping. It sits among the restored light station buildings — the 1861 keeper’s quarters, an old Coast Guard lifeboat station — and tells the stories of the ships and crews lost on these waters. The museum is best known for remembering the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the giant ore freighter that sank in a fierce November storm in 1975, about seventeen miles from the point. All twenty-nine men aboard were lost; it remains the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck of modern times.

The museum treats that loss with the gravity it deserves. The Fitzgerald’s bell was raised from the wreck in 1995 — a project carried out with the families’ blessing and with the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians among the partners — and it now hangs in the museum as a memorial, rung each year in honor of the crew. A replica engraved with their names was left on the wreck in its place. Whitefish Point is a beautiful, windswept spot, with a wide beach and good birdwatching, but it carries a real weight of history: it is, in the end, a place that remembers people who did not come home.