The retired freighter is moored on the east bank of the Maumee River next to the museum. Schoonmaker is easily the museum’s biggest attraction and its biggest artifact. It was used on Lake Erie until 1940 and was then used as a pig sty on Kelleys Island until 1970 when it was rescued by the Great Lakes Historical Society.Ī 22-ton ship’s propeller from the lake freighter John Sherwin sits outside the museum in a small riverbank park.īut the Col. It was designed by naval architect Joseph Francis to enable rescuers to get through heavy waves. Interestingly, the collection includes a 25-foot-long surf boat from 1854. Only 10 percent of the museum’s historical items are actually on display, officials said. The museum looks at the Great Lakes’ exploration and settlement industrial growth military history shipwrecks, lighthouses and survival and maritime technology and shipbuilding. Visitors learn that the Great Lakes contain 84 percent of all fresh water in North America and 21 percent of the world’s surface fresh water. You can hoist a heavy backpack like early European fur traders, learn how to pump a ship’s bilge to keep water out of leaky vessels and work together to fire the engine of a simulated coal-powered freighter. Lucian Clemons later became the keeper of the lighthouse at Marblehead. and Hubbard rowed a 12-foot boat to help rescue two seamen from a schooner that had overturned in Sandusky Bay in 1876. The museum has the very first medal, awarded to Lucian Clemons of Marblehead, who with his brothers A.J. It was awarded for bravery in rescuing people in distress on the water. In another exhibit, you can admire a gold life-saving medal established by Congress in 1874. Among those pilots was future president George H.W. They were used on Lake Michigan to train thousands of American pilots to safely land on a carrier. I had never heard about the two Great Lakes passenger steamers that were converted into aircraft carriers in World War II. The artifact was acquired when the sunken ship was raised in 1913. One of the most historic artifacts is a piece of the wooden frame of the USS Niagara, the flagship of American commander Oliver Hazard Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. There are exhibits on Great Lakes lighthouses (there are 326 of them), luxurious passenger ships that once sailed the lakes, the Underground Railroad, rum runners on the lakes, the 1913 White Hurricane that sank 12 boats and killed 240, and maritime technology and equipment. It is a great day-trip destination: You can easily tour the museum and the old ore boat in two to three hours. It is an interesting, fresh, bright, colorful and kid-friendly place designed to attract and entertain families with compelling stories. The museum’s goal is to educate and entertain, to let visitors learn how the Great Lakes affected the United States. It also features documentary videos and interactive displays. The exhibits cover 9,000 square feet of space in five galleries. The museum is filled with more than 250 historical artifacts from Great Lakes vessels and other sources, plus hundreds of photographs. You can look through goggles to view footage that divers took of the wreckage of the Cedarville that sank in the Straits of Mackinac in 1965, after it collided with another ship. The exhibit looks at an array of options to explain what happened to the lake freighter. There is also an interactive exhibit where visitors can direct a simulated submersible to the Fitzgerald wreck in an attempt to determine the cause of the sinking. The orange raft, one of two, automatically inflated and popped to the surface after the boat sank. Visitors to the $12.1 million National Museum of the Great Lakes will find one life raft and paddles from the Edmund Fitzgerald, a ship with strong Toledo ties, among the items from the boat. The wrecks featured in the museum include the most-famous Great Lakes shipwreck: the ore boat Edmund Fitzgerald that sank in Lake Superior on Nov. TOLEDO: There have been 8,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.Ī few of those are spotlighted in the expanded and relocated National Museum of the Great Lakes, a new Toledo attraction that opened in the spring and includes a 617-foot-long ore boat/museum ship.
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