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SS Eastland was an American Great Lakes passenger ship.

On July 24, 1915, the ship capsized while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. In total, 844 passengers and crew were killed in what is, as of 2026, the largest loss of life from a shipwreck on the Great Lakes and the Chicago area. After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy. After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette. She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

The ship was ordered in October 1902 by the Michigan Steamship Company and built by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan. The ship was originally meant to be named The City of South Haven, but a rival company, the Dunkley Williams Transportation Company, built a ship with the same name. A brief construction contest was held to determine who could use the name The City of South Haven.

Upon her return to South Haven in May 1904, the ship handily won a race to Chicago against The City of South Haven. In the meantime, Eastland was experiencing periodic problems with her stability while loading and unloading cargo and passengers, and nearly capsized on July 17th, 1904 after leaving South Haven with ~3,000 passengers. In 1909, the ship was sold again to the Eastland Navigation Company, and continued running excursions between Cleveland and Cedar Point. On July 1st, 1912, another incident occurred when Eastland experienced a severe listing of ~25 degrees while loading passengers in Cleveland. In June 1914, Eastland was sold to the St. Joseph–Chicago Steamship Company and returned to Lake Michigan for the St.

On July 24th, 1915, Eastland and four other Great Lakes passenger steamers—Theodore Roosevelt, Petoskey, Racine, and Rochester—were chartered to take employees from Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois to a picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. On the morning of July 24th, passengers began boarding Eastland on the south bank of the Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets at ~6:30 a.m.; by 7:10 a.m., the ship had reached her capacity of 2,500 passengers. Many of the passengers on Eastland were immigrants, with large numbers from present-day Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. Among those scheduled to be on Eastland was 20-year-old football player, George Halas, later the coach and owner of the Chicago Bears and a founding member of the National Football League, who was delayed leaving for the dock and arrived after the ship had overturned.

During hearings regarding the extradition of the men to Illinois for trial, principal witness, Sidney Jenks, president of the company that built Eastland, testified that her first owners wanted a fast ship to transport fruit, so he designed one capable of reaching 20 mph (32 km/h) and carrying 500 passengers. The court reasoned that the four company officers were not aboard the ship, and that every act charged against the captain and engineer was performed in the ordinary course of business, "more consistent with innocence than with guilt." The court also reasoned that Eastland "was operated for years and carried thousands safely," and therefore the accused were justified in believing the ship to be seaworthy.

After Eastland was raised on August 14, 1915, she was sold at auction to the Illinois Naval Reserve.

In 2012, Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre produced a musical entitled Eastland: A New Musical, written by Andy White and scored by Ben Collins-Sussman and Andre Pluess. The Eastland disaster is also pivotal to the story of one family told in the play/musical Failure: A Love Story, written by Philip Dawkins, which premiered in Chicago in 2012 at Victory Gardens Theater.

Quick Facts

• On July 24, 1915, the ship capsized while tied to a dock in the Chicago River.
• After the disaster, Eastland was salvaged and sold to the United States Navy.
• After restorations and modifications, Eastland was designated a gunboat and renamed USS Wilmette.
• The ship was ordered in October 1902 by the Michigan Steamship Company and built by the Jenks Ship Building Company of Port Huron, Michigan.
• She was used primarily as a training vessel on the Great Lakes, and was scrapped after World War II.

Source material: Wikipedia - "SS Eastland". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.