A research team from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has located the remains of the Western Reserve.
That ship – one of the first modern all-steel ships to sail the Great Lakes – broke apart and sank under mysterious conditions about 60 miles northwest of Whitefish Point in Lake Superior in 1892. 27 people perished in the wreck, including shipping magnate Captain Peter Minch, the boat’s owner, and much of his family. Only one crew member survived.
Bruce Lynn, Executive Director at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, said a research vessel from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society discovered the Western Reserve last summer about 600 feet underwater using marine sonar scan technology. That’s almost exactly where the sole surviving crewman reported it going down.
Lynn said the Western Reserve was built in 1890 by the Cleveland Shipbuilding Company, financed by Minch.
“He was a ship captain in his own right,” Lynn said. “He saw it as this ship that was going to be a record-breaking ship for his fleet. And in its short lifespan it was exactly that. He was breaking all kinds of shipping records, coal cargoes, grain, iron ore, you name it.”
In August of 1892, Minch decided to take the ship out for a cruise, bringing along his wife and children, along with his wife’s sister and her young daughter. At first, the weather was pleasant and the cruise went smoothly. But at some point around 9 p.m., a gale overtook the ship and it began to go down.
“And it breaks up 60 miles northwest of Whitefish Point,” Lynn said. “It sinks in ten minutes.”
The reason that it sank, and sank so rapidly, remains uncertain, Lynn said. However, the prevailing theory is that the ship was built using what’s known as “brittle steel.”
“It was steel that was not able to handle the kind of twisting that these ships undergo, where the hull is twisting in these heavy waves,” Lynn said. “And if they had the brittle steel, in many cases the hull would fracture. So if they got into cold water, the hull is twisting and it gets to a point where it just breaks.”
As for the shipwreck’s discovery, Lynn said it happened in July of 2024, as a team from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society was aboard a research vessel in Lake Superior.
“We have marine sonic technology side-scan sonar,” Lynn said. “We can see one half-mile out on each side of that sonar as we pull it apart on this cable, this kind of armored cable that has a lot of fiber optics and things like that.
“And they saw this anomaly and had a little bit of a shadow, a little bit of a straight line there. And voila, there was a shipwreck at that point in a very, very strange arrangement. The bow section of this 300-foot ship is resting on top of the stern section.”
Now that the Western Reserve wreck has finally been discovered, Lynn said the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum will share its story with the public.
“The museum becomes the perfect venue to tell these stories and keep the memories alive of these people like [crewman] Harry Stewart that survived,” he said. “But also memories of, say, the Minch family, or the other crew that was on board that particular shipwreck.”
