The story of the Lady Elgin, the deadliest shipwreck in Great Lakes history

The Lady Elgin left Chicago for Milwaukee on a stormy September night in 1860 with around 400 passengers aboard. Another vessel was also out in the storm — a small lumber schooner called The Augusta — which crashed into the Lady Elgin a few hours later. “The Lady Elgin was lit, but not well enough for the unlit Augusta to see it,” said Madeline Crispell, the curator at the Chicago Maritime Museum in Bridgeport, home to an exhibit on the Lady Elgin. “Neither ship was able to get out of the way in time.” The Lady Elgin cracked in half a few miles off the coast of Highland Park, Illinois. About 100 people managed to reach the shore, but around 300 lost their lives. “It's the deadliest shipwreck in Great Lakes history,” Crispell said. You may be familiar with the Eastland disaster, which killed over 800 people in 1915 while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. But Crispell said the wreck of the Lady Elgin was even more consequential. She said the Lady Elgin was key to the development of new requirements for lighting ships at night, in the creation of the U.S. Life-Saving Service in 1871, and in the opening of Evanston’s Grosse Point Lighthouse in 1873. In our last episode, we explored what area lighthouses like Grosse Point are used for now, since automation made keeper jobs obsolete. Today’s episode is about the reasons these lighthouses were built in the first place. “By the 1880s, if your ship were to sink off the coast of Highland Park, there would be a whole different system in place to help rescue you,” Crispell said. “And perhaps that's why the deadliest shipwreck in Lake Great Lakes history happened all the way back in 1860: because changes were made as a result of it.” Crispell told Curious City the story of why the Lady Elgin chose to disembark on such a stormy night, how a lighthouse could have helped its stranded passengers, and why the discovery of the wreckage over 125 years later was consequential, too. Music in this episode: Lost on the Lady Elgin by Lee Murdock

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The story of the Lady Elgin, the deadliest shipwreck in Great Lakes history is an episode from Curious City by WBEZ Chicago.

This episode is 00:15:36 long.

This episode was published on Apr 9, 2026.

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