At five o'clock on the afternoon of November 9, 1913, the SS Henry B. Smith backed away from the ore dock at Marquette, Michigan, and headed into Lake Superior. Observers on shore watched deckhands scrambling across her deck, trying to close thirty-two cargo hatches that normally took hours to secure. Twenty minutes later, the full force of the storm hit. Witnesses saw the 545-foot freighter turn hard to port -- possibly making for the lee of Keweenaw Point -- and then she was gone, swallowed by what would become known as the Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the deadliest inland maritime disaster in North American history. All twenty-five crew members perished. Only two bodies were ever found. The wreck itself would not be located for exactly one hundred years.
The Henry B. Smith was built in 1906 by the American Ship Building Company at Lorain, Ohio -- a steel-hulled lake freighter measuring 545 feet long, 55 feet wide, and 31 feet high, with a gross tonnage of 6,631. Her triple-expansion engine drove her through the Great Lakes hauling the raw material that built industrial America: iron ore. She was named for Henry B. Smith, a prominent lumberman who managed the Ludington Woodenware Company in Ludington, Michigan. Owned by the Acme Transit Company and managed by William A. Hawgood, the Smith was a workhorse of the ore trade, one of hundreds of long steel freighters that threaded the locks at Sault Ste. Marie and crossed Superior's open water in all seasons. Her hull number was 343. Her registration was US203143. Numbers that mattered to insurers and inspectors, and that would matter again a century later when divers needed to confirm what they had found on the lake bottom.
The Smith arrived at Marquette on November 6 to load iron ore. A southwest gale had already descended on Lake Superior, dropping temperatures to twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit. The cold froze the ore solid inside the hopper cars, forcing men to break it loose by hand. Loading dragged on for days. Captain James Owen had endured a season of delays and missed schedules, and rumors -- persistent then and repeated now -- held that the ship's owners had made it clear: make this last trip on time, or else. Whether that pressure was real or imagined, Owen made a decision that cost twenty-five lives. The moment the final car of ore was loaded at five p.m. on November 9, the Smith cast off immediately, her crew attempting to button up the ship while already underway. The brief lull that may have encouraged departure vanished within minutes.
Shore observers watched the Smith's deckhands working frantically on the open hatches as the ship pulled away from Marquette. Closing thirty-two hatches on a 545-foot freighter was methodical work under good conditions -- bolting down heavy steel covers one by one while the deck rolled beneath your feet. In a building storm, with ore dust and freezing spray, it was nearly impossible to do quickly. Twenty minutes after departure, the storm struck with full force. Witnesses saw the Smith turn to port. Then the ship disappeared behind curtains of snow and wave. Two days later, debris washed ashore at Chocolay Bay, Shot Point, and Laughing Fish Point -- fragments of a ship that had simply come apart. Second Cook H.R. Haskin's body was found floating fifty miles west of Whitefish Point days after the sinking. Third Engineer John Gallagher's skeleton washed up on Ile Parisienne the following spring. The other twenty-three crew members were never recovered.
The Great Lakes Storm of 1913 sank twelve ships and killed more than 250 sailors across Superior, Huron, and Erie. The Smith was one of many losses, but she became one of the most enduring mysteries -- a large steel freighter that simply vanished, her resting place unknown for a hundred years. In 2013, a search team located the wreck on the bottom of Lake Superior. She sits upright, broken in two near her midpoint, her cargo of iron ore spilled across the lake floor around her. The pilothouse and forward mast remain in place on the bow section. The stern cabin has imploded and collapsed under the pressure of depth and time. But her name is still fully legible on the stern -- the letters that confirmed, after a century of searching, that the Henry B. Smith had finally been found. Video footage taken the following month sealed the identification. The ship that twenty minutes of storm erased from the surface now rests in the permanent dark of Superior's depths, a memorial to twenty-five men and the economics of ore.
The wreck site is located at approximately 46.91°N, 87.33°W in Lake Superior, north-northeast of Marquette, Michigan. The ship lies on the lake bottom and is not visible from the air, but the surrounding geography tells the story: Marquette's ore docks are visible along the south shore, and the ship's last known heading was northwest toward Keweenaw Point (the peninsula jutting into Superior to the northwest). Debris washed ashore at Chocolay Bay, Shot Point, and Laughing Fish Point along the coast southeast of Marquette. Nearest airport is Sawyer International Airport (KSAW) approximately 10nm south of Marquette. The Marquette ore dock, where the Smith made her final departure, is a prominent shoreline feature. Lake Superior weather remains treacherous in this area, particularly in November -- the same conditions that sank the Smith. Whitefish Point, where one body was recovered, lies approximately 100nm to the east-northeast.