NEAR NORTH SIDE — Artifacts from the Eastland tragedy, one of Chicago’s most infamous and deadly maritime disasters, are now available to view digitally and in person at the Newberry Library.
In 1915, 844 people aboard the S.S. Eastland died when the boat overturned in the Chicago River.
Starting this month, thanks to a grant from the Illinois State Historical Records Advisory Board, a collection of photographs, postcards, death records and other materials related to the disaster are available for students, researchers, history buffs and descendants of victims and survivors to access from the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.
While researchers are still in the process of fully digitizing the collection, many items can already be viewed online and in person with an appointment.
The Newberry Library received the materials in 2019 from the Arlington Heights-based Eastland Disaster Historical Society, which has collected scores of artifacts over the past 25 years, including memorial cards, letters, personal diaries, excursion tickets, coroner’s records and American Red Cross archives, according to a press release from the Newberry.
The Eastland Disaster Historical Society also documents the stories of victims, survivors and their family members, emergency workers, divers, welders, undertakers and other bystanders, businesses and groups involved with the disaster and recovery efforts. It’s a decades-long attempt to record the entirety of the event and its aftermath, and the Newberry Library has joined.
Alison Hinderliter, the Lloyd Lewis curator of Modern Manuscripts at the Newberry, has been working on the Eastland Disaster project since its inception. She said the collection is an opportunity for Chicagoans to learn more about the city’s history through an event many don’t know much about despite its significance.
“We just want people to know about it and use [the collection] for research. They can do genealogical research, they can do social history, they can do Chicago history. There’s a lot of different ways you can use the collection for researching books or articles or podcasts,” Hinderliter said.
The Eastland Disaster Historical Society, which has operated since 1998, chose the Newberry Library to receive its collection as its small, three-person crew eases into retirement, Hinderliter said. While some items are still in the process of being transferred to the Newberry, many have already been digitized for online viewing, she said.
A second phase of the project will focus on adding materials from the aftermath of the tragedy, Hinderliter said.
Ted Wachholz is the executive director and chief historian of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society; his wife and sister-in-law are granddaughters of an Eastland survivor and run the organization with him. He said making sure their collection is widely accessible is important as many people in Chicago didn’t know about the event when their organization started 25 years ago, and many still don’t.
Because Wachholz sees the Eastland disaster as “largely … buried by history,” the organization is thankful for the Newberry’s interest in the collection.
“Now we have the best of both worlds: The public has access to the documents and the photos,” Wachholz said. “They’ll be preserved in Newberry’s amazing archival facilities; and through our website, people around the world will have free access for generations to come.”
The S.S. Eastland was one of five boats charted by the Western Electric Company for a staff picnic in Michigan City, Indiana.
While stationed on the Chicago River near the Clark Street Bridge on July 24, 1915, the Eastland, the first of the five boats to arrive, overturned after hundreds of eager company employees boarded. It was known for being top-heavy and unsteady. Hundreds were crushed and drowned only yards from shore.
The Eastland was later converted to a gunboat and renamed the U.S.S. Wilmette by the Illinois Naval Reserve, Hinderliter said.
Materials from the Eastland collection, or from the Newberry’s other collections, are free to view in person for visitors 14 and older. Those interested can contact the library via email, and a reference librarian can guide those interested through the materials, Hinderliter said.
Hinderliter believes the collection can highlight significant details about the day and the lives lost, such as the fact that many of the dead were young adults in their 20s and were immigrants from European countries who did not know how to swim.
With more than 2,500 people aboard, 22 entire families were lost in the disaster, according to the Eastland Disaster Historical Society.
The Newberry Library and the Eastland Historical Society will continue seeking out the stories of Eastland Disaster survivors and victim descendants, which Hinderliter believes will provide a “fuller,” “more personal” history of the disaster, she said.
“I think part of our mission and also the mission of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society is to raise awareness about [the disaster] so that people know their own city’s history,” Hinderliter said.
“It’s a little bit more than ‘Oh, yeah, I heard of the Eastland Disaster; I don’t know anything about it’ or, ‘I heard that it tipped over.’ … We want to make sure that the history is accurate because we have so much good documentation on it. We want to make sure people learn what that actual history was.”
The Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., opens 10 a.m. Tuesday-Saturday. The reading rooms and bookstore close at 4 p.m., the exhibition galleries close 7 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and 5 p.m. Friday-Saturday. For more information, visit the Newberry website.
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