Over a century ago, men erected a single Christmas tree and strung it with lights on the docks of northern Michigan. Not in a humble home or town square, but on a festive sailing ship, a three-masted schooner whose central mast was adorned with a single Christmas tree as the main flag. She was known as the “Christmas Tree Ship,” led by a jolly captain, named Herman Schuenemann, who loved delivering trees to folks every winter. They called him “Captain Santa.”
For decades, people lined up on the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago during the holiday season to watch Captain Santa sail in, his vessel laden with winter evergreens chopped down by Yooper lumberjacks and sold for 50 cents or $1. Captain Santa, a seasoned lake captain, also sold fresh wreaths and garland made by his wife Barbara and their two daughters.
Captain Schuenemann was born at the pinnacle of sail-powered vessels on the lake, 1868, incidentally the same year the Rouse Simmons was first built. After that year, the number of sail-powered ships steadily declined, as did the physical integrity of the Rouse Simmons. This wasn’t a major concern for Captain Santa, whose business model relied on taking a part ownership in older ships, banking on the nostalgia of full sails to market his product.
So there he stood, on the Thompson docks near Manistique, looking out at the cold waters from his battered deck, the Rouse Simmons well past her heyday, having spent many decades delivering lumber around Lake Michigan. Schuenemann knew about the troubling weather coming in, but the ship left anyway on Nov. 22, 1912.
The worn-down schooner was filled with thousands of Christmas trees. Many described the sight as a “floating forest.” She sailed out into calm waters that would roil into a deadly gale, taking down not just one but four major vessels in one monstrous sweep.
The day after the Rouse Simmons departed northern Michigan, a man working at a lifesaving station in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, alerted his station’s captain of seeing the Rouse Simmons with a flag signaling distress. A rescue effort was made, but they had quickly lost sight of the ship through the snow and mist, as did the next station south.
Thompson would prove to be the Rouse Simmons‘ last port of call. The many excited faces lined up on the Clark Street Bridge would never see Captain Santa again. But it wouldn’t be the last time the Christmas Tree ship was seen on Lake Michigan.
When Captain Santa didn’t arrive in Chicago that November, his wife was worried. Some ships were known to wait out in a harbor for a few days as a storm passed, so it didn’t automatically mean the worst. But by December 1912, Christmas trees and wreckage began washing ashore in places like Pentwater, and reports in the local papers confirmed the ship’s demise.
Every year after, all the way until her death, Barbara continued to oversee the cutting and delivery of evergreens by schooner, though she eventually switched to trains instead of boats. Her daughters carried on by selling trees in their own lot in the years after their mother’s passing.
Years later, in 1924, a tugboat named Reindeer pulled up an old wallet in a fishing net. The seamen opened the contents to find Herman Schuenemann’s belongings. Clippings of his work as Captain Santa on the Rouse Simmons were folded up with receipts and personal cards wrapped in birch bark, still surprisingly intact. The shipwreck hadn’t yet been found, but no one questioned her fate.
Since the tragedy, there have been countless books, documentaries, several plays, poems, musicals, and songs written about the timeless tale of the Christmas Tree Ship. But the greatest sign that we still have a strong connection with the story are the many sightings throughout the years of the Christmas Tree Ship out on the water, glimpsed through the mist.
I’ve asked every sailor I’ve talked to this year, “What was the strangest thing you’ve seen or heard of seeing?” Ghost ships, and the Rouse Simmons in particular, have been mentioned unironically, and more than once. “It’s quite an odd thing, that’s for sure,” one old sailor said to me, misty-eyed on the deck of the S.S. Milwaukie Clipper.
The U.S. Coast Guard continues to commemorate the Schuenemann family and the Rouse Simmons by taking the cutter, Mackinaw, every December from northern Michigan to Chicago, with a symbolic cargo of Christmas trees to give to the community.
There were no known survivors, but their story remains frozen in time. The icy waters preserved them like a historic snow globe, a fitting memorial for Captain Santa.
Devinn Dakohta is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer. Follow her on Instagram @Devinn.Dakohta and X @DevinnDakohta.
