SS Edmund Fitzgerald
American Great Lakes freighter
SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American Great Lakes freighter that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29 men. When launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on North America's Great Lakes and remains the largest to have sunk there. Her wreck was located in deep water on November 14, 1975, by a U.S. Navy aircraft detecting magnetic anomalies, and soon afterwards found to be in two large pieces.
For 17 years, Edmund Fitzgerald carried taconite (a variety of iron ore) from mines along the Minnesota Iron Range near Duluth, Minnesota, to iron works in Detroit, Michigan; Toledo, Ohio; and other Great Lakes ports. As a workhorse, she set seasonal haul records six times, often breaking her own record. Captain Peter Pulcer was known for piping music day or night over the ship's intercom while passing through the St. Clair and Detroit rivers (between Lake Huron and Lake Erie), and entertaining spectators at the Soo Locks (between Lakes Superior and Huron) with a running commentary about the ship. Her size, record-breaking performance, and "DJ captain" endeared Edmund Fitzgerald to boat watchers.
On the afternoon of November 9, 1975, she embarked on her final voyage from Superior, Wisconsin, near Duluth, carrying a full cargo of taconite ore pellets with Master Captain Ernest M. McSorley in command. En route to a steel mill near Detroit, she was caught the next day in a severe storm with near-hurricane-force winds and waves up to 35 feet (11 m) high.
“SS Edmund Fitzgerald” enters the record as american Great Lakes freighter. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edmund, Fitzgerald and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1286267. VIAF identifies the subject as 126902077. The Library of Congress control number is n2009050737. Authority coordinates are 46.998, -85.110. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Edmund Fitzgerald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.