SAULT STE. MARIE — For the last 40 years, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has sought to teach the people of Michigan the history of the lakes that surround them.
The society was founded in the 1970s with the goal of telling the stories of the many shipwrecks dotting the lakebed, and through those shipwrecks, tell the history of the Great Lakes.
In 1972, a group of scuba divers in Michigan were searching for shipwrecks off the coast of Whitefish Point, near Paradise in the Upper Peninsula. Using just whatever scuba equipment they could find and a sonar set, this small group of divers discovered four different shipwrecks in one day.
John V. Moran circa 1888
“So after discovering those wrecks at once, one thing led to another. So this organization started its history by actual scuba diving shipwrecks that to our knowledge no one had ever seen before,” said development officer Sean Ley, who has been a member of the shipwreck society since the 1980s. “At about the same time, Whitefish Township, which is in Chippewa County, applied to the National Register of Historic Places to get the Whitefish Point light-station on the National Register.”
With the historic lighthouse as their point of operations, the society began cataloguing as many shipwrecks as they could. Most of them came from the waters of Lake Superior.