Rogers City — When freighters head out on the Great Lakes in November, their crews know the risk on the tumultuous inland freshwater seas. Many know about the gales of November that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald 50 years ago, but far fewer have heard of the Carl D. Bradley.
This shipwreck ought have a hold on Michigan’s memory, given that the tragedy claimed the lives of more Michigan men than any other Great Lakes shipwreck. Of 35 crewmates, 31 were from northern Michigan, and 23 of the 33 men who died hailed from the small port town of Rogers City.
The Bradley began sailing in 1927. She was named for the president of the Michigan Limestone and Chemical Company, the Bradley’s owning company and a division of U.S. Steel. As the largest ship traversing the lakes at the time, she was unofficially considered the “Queen of the Great Lakes.”
At 639 feet in length, the Bradley was the first ship in its fleet to be entirely powered by electricity. But it wasn’t mainly the electric power and her size that made the Bradley a mighty freighter. She was a self-unloading vessel that used a conveyor system to carry cargo up to a boom and onto the shore or dock where she was anchored.
Because of her status as a self-unloader, the Bradley could pull up and unload its shipment where other, non-self-unloading ships were unable.
During the course of its career, the Bradley carried limestone from Port Calcite, the largest limestone quarry by surface area in the world. From this port at Rogers City, the ship would carry its shipments across the Great Lakes region, often delivering to Gary, Indiana.
In the slow shipping season of 1958, the Bradley was laid up from July through October. But at the end of the season, business started picking up, and the freighter was brought out onto the lakes again. During the winter months, the ship was scheduled for major repairs, including a replacement of the rusting cargo hold, at the shipyard in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
On the night of Nov. 17, the Bradley’s crew left Buffington Harbor, outside Gary, after what was to be the ship’s last delivery of the season. As they made their way up the Wisconsin coast, U.S. Steel scheduled one more delivery and called the crew back to Calcite in Rogers City. This was in the midst of a terrible storm, in which warm air from the south hit cold air from the north.
Around 5:35 p.m. on Nov. 18, as the ship was nearing Gull Island and the turn toward the Straits of Mackinac, watchman Frank Mays heard a loud thud and felt a vibration go through the ship. Meanwhile, in the pilothouse, Captain Roland Bryan and First Mate Elmer Fleming heard the same sound.
As they looked down the ship’s deck, they saw that the stern was sagging. The ship was breaking in two. Bryan sounded the alarm to abandon ship while Mays managed to get out a “mayday,” the distress call which reached the Coast Guard and other ships on Lake Michigan—all before the electric cables snapped and the ship’s radio went dead.
Mays, Fleming, and two other men eventually found themselves on the ship’s raft. Mays and Fleming would be the only two survivors after being tossed off of the raft multiple times and only discovered the next day by the Coast Guard cutter, the Sundew. The other two had perished in the lake or from hypothermia, along with the other victims of the crew.
Residents in Rogers City began getting word that something happened to the Bradley. The news spread with phone calls and with people running to neighbor’s houses. Eventually, the telephone switchboard would be open only to those who had family on the boat.
Some relatives of the crewmates drove over to Charlevoix to be closer to where the ship sank. Having little to no information on the fates of their husbands and brothers, the breadwinners of their families, they refused to stay at home.
Not realizing the ship had gone down on the far side of the Beaver Island Chain, but acting from what hope they had, these relatives parked their cars on the shore and shone their headlights out into Lake Michigan.
Mike Horn, whose uncle Paul Horn was a Bradley oiler and died in the sinking, recalls when news reached his family that evening. They were celebrating his brother’s first birthday when a neighbor knocked on the door and gave Mike’s mother the news.
“That was the end of the party,” remembered Mike, who was 4 at the time. “It was like a switch had flipped in the room.”
Mike’s father, who was sailing on the John G. Munson of the Bradley Fleet, later returned home.
Something of the same scene played out in dozens of homes that night. Many women in the town of about 3,800 became widows overnight. At the time of the sinking, many fleets employed local men to work the freighters. This meant that the Bradley Fleet, based out of Port Calcite, drew men from not only Rogers City but from nearby Onaway, Metz, and even Cheboygan.
Due to this high concentration of Michigan men from one town, the wreck of the Bradley devastated Rogers City.
A large wake was held in the high school gymnasium with the bodies recovered by the Coast Guard. Residents like Mike Horn who lost relatives on the Bradley supported one another. Families and friends filled the pews of St. Ignatius of Loyola Catholic Church for one funeral mass for the congregation’s lost men. Other local churches held similar ceremonies.
In the wake of the Bradley’s sinking, certain safety precautions and more stringent inspection requirements were eventually instated. In 1973, the United States and Canada signed a treaty, which included a regulation for a reserve power source for the pilothouse radio.
Because ships built in the era of the Bradley were made of more brittle steel than later ships, the Coast Guard recommended more tests for ships’ hulls to look for rust and fractures. Great Lakes freighters also replaced open rafts, like those from the Bradley, with inflatable rafts that included covers for protection against wind and water.
Shipping is a major industry across the Great Lakes. In communities like Rogers City, many have either a friend or relative still sailing the lakes. At the time the Bradley sailed, there were only so many career opportunities. Unless one grew up on a farm, or their family owned a business, the best way of making a living would likely be sailing.
Mike Horn, like his father and uncle, took to the water in the 1970s. In towns like Rogers City, you still find multiple generations employed to sail the Great Lakes.
Those who remember Michigan’s other November tragedy are becoming fewer, but its effects linger. A memorial for the crews of the Bradley and another local lost ship, the Cedarville, sits within view of the local marina and the Lake Huron shoreline.
Rogers City also has an annual bell-ringing ceremony for the lost men. In 2007, a pair of divers, with permission from the crewmates’ families, recovered the ship’s bell and left a replacement bell, engraved with the names of the crew.
Each year, residents gather for the memorial ceremony honoring the victims of the Bradley at the Great Lakes Lore Maritime Museum, where Horn serves as director. Relatives and friends are invited to ring the ship’s bell—the only time it is allowed to be rung—once for each of the 33 men lost on Lake Michigan.
Nolan Ryan is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
