 very much everybody for coming. This is our first speaker series since March of 2020. We took a little hiatus for the last couple of years, rested our bones, that kind of thing. But we're happy to be back. And we are following it up, continuing the March series of 2020 with the history of transportation in Sheboygan County. So this week and following three weeks, we will cover different aspects of transportation history in Sheboygan County. I'm Travis Gross, I'm the executive director here at the Sheboygan County Historical Society. Some of you are pretty accustomed to seeing Chloe Cider, our program coordinator up front doing this. She is unfortunately, could be potentially minutes away from giving birth to her first child. So I said I would fill in and play her role for this evening. So tonight, we are joined here by Greg Lutz. He is the visitor's engagement officer, director, director, coordinator, one of those words that means he leads things. And so he will be sharing information on shipping and the water transportation of Sheboygan County in this area of Wisconsin. So let's hear it for Greg. My name is Greg Lutz, like Travis said. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for having me to kick off the transportation speaker series once again. Like Travis said, I'm going to be talking about shipping in Sheboygan County. So the title of my presentation is Furniture Fires and the Phoenix. It's a little bit of a bleak title for shipping, but it'll all make sense by the end of my presentation here. So I made this before I knew Travis was going to give me such an eloquent introduction here. But who am I and why am I here speaking about shipping? So I am the visitor engagement coordinator at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum just up the road in Manitowoc. So I do a lot of these types of speaking engagements for the Maritime Museum. Most of the time it's more Manitowoc focused, but a lot of Sheboygan as well. Although I'm more focused on the education side of things, so most of my audiences are a lot shorter than all of you. But I tried to bring this up a little bit. So also I got my start right here at the museum. And this was my first real museum internship. I was an intern for Tamara right back there, so she gave me my first museum shot. So it's very weird to be on this side of the podium. I was an intern for three years. I made that chair exhibit right out there. So this was my first real step in the museum world. I was also born raised and educated right here in Southeast Wisconsin. Born in Kiel, went to school at UW Green Bay and then UW Milwaukee. So I spent my whole life right around this area. So let's start at the beginning as we get into shipping here. You'll see a lot of histories of Sheboygan shipping tend to start in like the 1830s, which is fine, but I'm gonna take it a little bit further than that. So we're gonna start at the very beginning. For thousands of years, various indigenous peoples have called this area home. There's been a whole lot of tribes that have come through this area, but the main groups consist of Potawatomi, Chippewa, Ottawa, Winnebago, and Menominee. In fact, the name Sheboygan, the name of the city, is an indigenous word. There's some debate on what it means. There's a lot of words that sound like Sheboygan in various languages. Potawatomi has a word that means like the wild rice gathering place, although the most likely word is no jibway word, which means through the drumming and it's referenced into the Sheboygan Falls. So the falls sound like drumming. That's where most people believe the word Sheboygan came from. The earliest watercraft on Sheboygan lakes and rivers are the dugout canoes, much like this photograph right over here. They've been around for 8,000 to 12,000 years, depending on which anthropologists you ask. And those were used for transportation, trade, fishing, and hunting, all along the Sheboygan River, even on the western coast of Lake Michigan. Here's just a map on the left of some of the native territories that I've talked about. So you see a lot of the nations that I discussed. Here we are right over about this area in Sheboygan. That picture on the right is actually an interesting find that came out just about halfway through 2021. These are maritime archaeologists pulling a dugout canoe out of Lake Mendota, which is a lake right around Madison. They estimate this canoe is about 1,200 years old, making it the oldest intact watercraft in Wisconsin. So this is one of those old dugout canoes I just told you about. And they just found it last year. So that just shows that this is an ongoing history. We're always learning new things. That canoe is currently being preserved at the Wisconsin Historical Society. So they're hoping to eventually be able to display that a little more properly as they take care of it and record it and things like that. So now getting into kind of the traditional history, the 1830s, how does Sheboygan come Sheboygan? Well, shipping and the water has a lot to do with that, of course. The Al Gore of the water, I've called it, as most of you probably know, it's sort of a historical trope that these big, fantastic cities tend to pop up around water, whether it's a big river or the ocean or a lake. Water is kind of the common factor for most of our large cities. Here's a quote from 1845. This is Dr. Elijah Knowles, writing back to his family. He was originally from New York, but he had traveled to Sheboygan. He was a man of some wealth, so he was out here kind of scoping out business, potential business options. And he writes to his family, the Sheboygan River is one of the most beautiful rivers I have ever seen. Water is as pure as crystal, good water power at the falls. There is a village talking about Sheboygan. Growing up upon the lakeshore, very thriving, and will one day be our harbor, it is laid out for a city. So he's kind of right on two points there. It is definitely gonna be a great city, as we can all see. And also it will one day be a harbor. And he is kind of spot on that, and I'll show you what I mean on the next slide here. The Sheboygan Harbor that we all know and love today was not always, didn't always look the way it did now. So this is a map of the Sheboygan Harbor in 1836. I've kind of circled the main issue with Sheboygan's Harbor. There was a lot of like protruding sandbars and kind of dangerous ridges that came into the harbor early on in its existence. And this kind of like, this really restricted the infrastructure and the business that could come in Sheboygan at the time. Instead of coming into this harbor and docking along these businesses, the early ships had to drop anchor right out here and bring all of their supplies and people in on rowboats or small, other small craft. So it was very difficult to bring in large shipments of people or goods. So until the early ways they tried to alleviate that were these piers here. These are North and South pier. This is South pier. It looks fairly similar to as it does today. North pier, as you know, does not look like this now, but I have a more modern picture on the next slide. So one of the earliest problems for Sheboygan was getting all these business people together and finding the investment necessary to kind of dredge out this whole sandbar to make a more productive harbor. That happened in 1852 at the cost of about $65,000, half of which they got from the federal government. They were able to clear out that sandbar and extend the piers much further into Lake Michigan. So now I have kind of a side-by-side. Here's that 1836 map once again. And here's a modern day my app. So here we have the Coast Guard station and the yacht club so you get kind of an idea of where we are here. You'll notice there is no longer a ridge. We have this nice open harbor now. Here's North Pier right over here. It opens up to make this big bay. And also North Pier is, of course, on the slant now, as you can see. So naturally, expanding the harbor creates an explosion of opportunities here. As soon as that harbor is expanded in 1852, the ship building kind of follows right away. In fact, there's such a boom in 1852 that complaints were actually that Sheboygan became too busy after the harbor was opened. There were complaints in the local newspaper and things. They compared Sheboygan to a mining town because it was so dirty and so overrun with people because so many people were flooding into the city at once. So in the term of like six months you had, there's not enough opportunity here, we can't build infrastructure too. Whoa, stop, there's too much infrastructure. So it's kind of an interesting trade-off there. So before this harbor was expanded, a lot of the steamer, big steamer lines were going from Buffalo or New York City. They would stop in Milwaukee or down to Chicago. Sheboygan's kind of an afterthought. Manitowoc's harbor hadn't been built at all by that point. So Sheboygan's kind of a stop, but not really a destination for those ships. After the harbor, that changes completely. Sheboygan becomes the main point of entry for residents of Dodge County, Manitowoc County, and Fond du Lac County. And it also becomes a destination for a lot of those ships coming from New York. All right, so speaking of immigration, I'll move on to immigration a little bit here. If we build it, they will come. Speaking of the harbor, of course, just a couple of statistics here to give you an idea of how much immigration exploded. So in the 1840s, estimates place immigrants per year at about 4,000, which is a decent number. Of course, those aren't residents that are staying in Sheboygan. Those are people just coming through the port of Sheboygan. So a lot of them are going to Manitowoc, Fond du Lac, Dodge County, and things like that. In 1854, just about 10 years later, 20,000 people came through Sheboygan harbors. So that's a 500% increase in just two years. But the most staggering statistic, so that 20,000 is 1854. In 1855, there were 68,000 people. So that just shows you that six month change that I was talking about. Just how much the harbor had an impact on Sheboygan. At its peak, like I said, people compared Sheboygan to a mining town. There was actually serious consideration that Sheboygan was gonna be the next great Lake Michigan city. People were comparing it to Milwaukee, comparing it to Chicago. Actually, at this point, at its peak in the early, in 1855 through about 1860, more immigrants were actually coming through the Sheboygan harbor than it bore Milwaukee. So Sheboygan really was the premier port on Lake Michigan besides maybe Chicago at this time. So it really was a big change for the area. With immigration came a lot of new industries, of course, the first of which is hospitality. With all those new people coming in, you need to feed them. You need to house them. You need to give them supplies. Going back a couple of slides here. The first kind of main street for Sheboygan in response to all of this is Center Avenue. For those who don't know, Center Avenue is this street right about here, north of the Sheboygan Yacht Club. In 1850s, during the immigrant boom, in 1855 there's 11 hotels on Center Avenue alone, just to support all the people that are coming through that area. By 1860, that number has doubled just on Center Avenue. So this is really the place to be. Huge hospitality boom as all these people are coming in through the port of Sheboygan. So as I said there, in addition to immigration, all a bunch of new industries are coming in as a result of the harbor. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this background image here. This is the Four Seas of Sheboygan, which are known as chairs, cheese, children, and churches. I'll reference a few of them here when I talk about the industries that came in with the shipping boom. This is just kind of an overall map of the Sheboygan harbor. This was taken in 1885 or drawn in 1885. And even without breaking this map down too much, you can really see how much shipping kind of controls the industry here in Sheboygan. I mean, there's just so much industry and massive industrial centers being built right along just this small part of the harbor here. So this is about the opening of the harbor and this is the Eighth Street Bridge. So in just that little area, we've got Crocker chairs right here. You can see their lumber yards all around. This is Sheboygan manufacturing company down here in the bottom left. And I counted this earlier before I came. There are 27 ships in this image. So that's a lot of ships in the harbor at one time. So this is a 24-hour operation. Sheboygan is booming particularly right here around that part of the harbor. Here's kind of the close-up of an individual factory. This is a tannery that's located right about this area of the harbor. So you can see kind of the setup of what these factories were looking like as they grew around the river. The most productive factories of this time took advantage of this right here. So next week, if you're coming for the next part of the Speaker Series, you're gonna be learning about the trains. The most productive factories had both the train line and the shipyards right about here. Factories were taking so much advantage of shipping that they had full-time captains and boat workers working for a lot of these big factories. So without shipping, it's fair to say that a lot of these industries wouldn't have grown in the way that they did. So I'll go through a few prominent industries that came up as a result of shipping. A few of those seas that I mentioned will be mentioned in this part of the presentation. The first, of course, if you're gonna get involved in shipping, you need to be involved in shipbuilding. Sheboygan's kind of a natural spot for shipbuilding to come up for a couple of reasons. First of all, lumber is very plentiful in this reason. A number of lumber mills are already in production up by Sheboygan Falls. That quote that I shared with you earlier demonstrates that even before Sheboygan was a city, Sheboygan Falls had lumber mills that were churning out lumber just up the river there. So lumber was plentiful. It was also coming down from northern Wisconsin at this time. And even before the production of the harbor, there was a bit of a shipbuilding history here, but they were much smaller ships. We were getting shipping vessels, a few shipping vessels, but mostly like fishing boats and things like that, much smaller craft. But after the harbor was completed, shipbuilding became huge business and very competitive. A couple of examples of these in 1854, AP Lyman, who was a wealthy goods merchant in the area, he gets rid of all his assets and sinks them into shipbuilding, because he thinks that's the next big thing in Sheboygan. Unfortunately, a bunch of his ships sink and he loses all his money. But he took a shot, which shows the confidence that people had in shipbuilding at the time. In the 1860s, hundreds of people are employed in the shipbuilding industry, and then the industry really hits its peak in the 1880s when a man named Cap and Rybeholt starts a shipbuilding company on land that would later be the Rice Coal Peninsula, a company which I'll talk about a little more now. At its peak, that company employed about 200 men. During their time in Sheboygan, they made just over 30 crafts. There's some debate if it's 31 or 32 boats. Unfortunately, that was not a very long time. That company left Sheboygan in 1896 after a land dispute with the city. But 31 boats in about 10 years is really remarkable for this time, and they were big craft as well. Here I have a couple examples for you. Up in the top left is the Helena. This is a very famous ship. Some of you might have heard of it. This is the largest ship to ever come out of Sheboygan. It's 318 feet long. So just about as long as Lambeau Field, for example. So this is a big ship. Something they tend to do with ships back then is measure them by the amount of wheat they can carry. It's kind of weird, but you see this over and over again. So for example, Helena carries about 100,000 bushels of wheat. In every article I read, it's like this ship costs $65,000 and carried 100,000 bushels of wheat. So if that tells you how much wheat was important to the industry, I don't know what does. Ship launchings, Helena's a great example of this, were huge events here in Sheboygan at the time. Sheboygan had a population of about 15,000 when Helena was launched in 1888. 10,000 showed up to the launching. So that's just two thirds of your city in one spot for one event. Nothing I can think of brings that kind of crowd out today, but Helena did, so that's very cool. Helena was built for a company down in Milwaukee, though, but it did spend a lot of time in Sheboygan's ports bringing goods back and forth. These other two over here were also made by Vibehold Company. These are two tugs that were built for very different reasons. This one over here, getting my pictures mixed up. Yes, this top one is the James Foley. This was built in the 1890s and was purchased by the Milwaukee Fire Department. As you can see, it's a fire tug, so here's down in the port of Milwaukee, putting out a fire. That one served in the Fire DeMarbon until the 1930s when it was scrapped in Lake Michigan. And this one is a tug named the Sheboygan, which gets very complicated. There's a paddle wheeler called the Sheboygan. This tug called the Sheboygan. Later, there's a USS Sheboygan. So I think Sheboygan was important in the shipbuilding industry. But it gets a little confusing. This tug served right around here for most of its career, mostly on Lake Michigan and was retired in 1918. So this is just a nice little overview from the very large to the very small of the ships that were being built here in Sheboygan. The next industry I've become known around here as the chair guy, so I can't get away without talking about furniture. The furniture industry could not have happened without the shipping industry. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Sheboygan makes the ideal spot for furniture manufacturing. Lumber is plentiful around here, just like shipbuilding. A lot of those components are very similar, but also there's a lot of skilled craftsmen coming into the ports. A lot of carpenters from Germany, Ireland, those Western European countries that are coming through Sheboygan. Skilled craftsmen, and they figure why travel when I can stop right here and start my industry here. So that's where a lot of the furniture making comes from. Then another component that a lot of people tend not to think about is that tons of immigrants were coming in through these ports. One thing that they do not have is furniture. You can bring a lot of stuff with you, you can bring your food, you can bring your clothes, you can bring things like that. You're not bringing a dining table across the ocean. So immigrants that are coming from Europe are in desperate need of furniture, so these industries are kind of a natural fit to sprint up and meet that demand. Sheboygan's harbor makes shipping furniture easy and efficient. I showed you kind of that tannery earlier, but all of them are set up in a similar way. They can bring boats right up to the factory to unload lumber, load them up with furniture, and send them back out on their way. And these chair factories were so successful that many of them lasted well into the 20th century. I have a few prominent examples kind of here on this slide. Over on the left, I have Thonnais, which started as an American chair before it changed to Thonnais and eventually closed in 1982. In the top right, I have Crocker chair, which I showed you on that 1888 map. That started in 1865, and it was eventually purchased by Phoenix chair in the 1930s. And speaking of Phoenix chair, there's Phoenix chair right down here. This was one of the bigger factories in Sheboygan. Started in 1870s at its peak, employed just under a thousand people and closed its doors for good in the 1960s. Those of you who are very familiar with Sheboygan history know that besides chair factories, there is one thing that these factories have in common. Anyone? They all burn down. Yeah, so now you know where the fires come from. Particularly Phoenix. Not to foreshadow my presentation too much here, but if you're gonna build something mostly out of wood in Sheboygan, I would not name it Phoenix. I'm just gonna say. The next industry I have here is the coal, and the Reese Company. Can't really mention coal here in Sheboygan without bringing up Reese Company. Reese Company had very humble beginnings though, despite the massive corporation that it ultimately turned into. In 1880, a very small coal yard was established. Mr. Reese was just kind of dipping his toe into it here. Early signs were very not promising. He purchased 400 tons of coal for that first season. He still had coal unsold at the beginning of that first season, so it was very downtrodden. Sheboygan was not particularly interested in his coal. We were a furniture city, we were a wood city, and wood scraps from the furniture company were just cheaper, more plentiful, so the coal wasn't really necessary. He kind of survived by shipping it to places like Fond du Lac or further into the state, but eventually the coal caught on. It was more reliable. It burned for longer and more consistently. So by 1893, just 13 years later, the company handled 65,000 tons of coal and sold out that season by the 1940s. They were up to about 600,000 tons, and that was about the peak of the company there in the 1940s. But Reese not only benefited from Sheboygan shipping, they also moved the company forward. So this was kind of a mutual relationship. Later on in 1916, Reese established their own shipbuilding company. It wasn't stationed here in Sheboygan, it was actually in Minnesota, but all of their ships spent time on Lake Michigan and worked for the coal factory, and they made a lot of advancements in things like self-unloading boats and freighters and things like that. So it was a mutually beneficial relationship between Sheboygan shipping and the Reese company. The final industry I have impacted by the shipping industry is food production. So Sheboygan offered bountiful food sources both from the land and the sea, particularly for the early immigrants. The open countryside was kind of the ideal spot to start in the farming industry, that's what drew a lot of them here. Farming was by far the most common profession for those early immigrants to take, and those crops were then shipped all over the Great Lakes territories. Meanwhile, the lake offered a bounty of things like sturgeon, whitefish, and lake trout, which drew in early immigrants, particularly from Lake Erie, where those fish were no longer as good, they were kind of fished out by that point. So that drew fishermen into Sheboygan as well. Crops served as the backbone to the early economy, particularly wheat. As I said, when you're measuring the success of your boats and how much wheat they can carry, wheat is probably a pretty important a part of your economy. Tons of wheat being taken out of here. And then Sheboygan also became a massive food exporter into the 20th century as well. Fish became more smoked or salted early on to transport them before they had proper refrigeration. Later on, of course, that changed. But also things that I don't mention in great detail is beer. Some of you might be familiar with Gutch. Is that am I saying that correctly? Gutch, Gutch, Gutch, Gutch. Thank you. I thought so, I thought so. But they relied heavily on the shipping industry, of course. And they took their beer up and down the coasts of Wisconsin. Cheese, of course, I've been told that Plymouth's been named the cheese capital of the world. I don't know if that's true. But that's what they claim. And their factories use the Sheboygan harbors to ship their goods, use the Sheboygan river to move it along. And then before refrigeration, they used ice from the Sheboygan river as well to keep that cheese cool on long voyages. So all tied into the shipping and the waterways of Sheboygan here as well. And then here are just a couple of really neat images I got from the Historical Research Center, showing early fishing here in Sheboygan. Here are some of the very early fishing shanties down by the north pier at this time is that top left image. Here's sort of the end. This is in the 1940s. So this is a year-round fishing tug brigade. So this is four ships owned by the same company here. And then this is in the early 1900s. These are the fish shanties down by the docks. And here they're cleaning nets and things like that. So for a long time, these were owned by kind of a couple of big companies. But later in the 1900s, they had kind of scattered to smaller, locally owned groups, which is what this is down here. All right, so now I kind of foreshadowed this a little bit. My museum would be very upset with me if I did a talk and didn't talk about shipwrecks. So it wasn't all success and big money for everyone in the shipping industry. There was a fair share of risk as well. So I'll talk about three of the more famous shipwrecks that are related here to Sheboygan. The first, of course, is the Phoenix. And the story of the Phoenix is a very sad one. The Phoenix was not carrying cargo. It was not a cargo ship. It was carrying immigrants from the Netherlands. Dutch immigrants primarily coming here for religious freedom. The Netherlands was going through a bit of a religious reform at the time. So they were trying to find a new place to live. Immigrants at this time, the typical path was coming from Europe to New York. They would go to Albany on the Hudson River, then to Buffalo on the Erie Canal, then through the Great Lakes all the way to Lake Michigan. So this is many, many months of travel to get from Europe over to Lake Michigan. And perhaps the saddest part of that journey was that Phoenix was so, so close to making it when the tragedy struck. Phoenix was the top of the line steamer for its day. It was only three years old when it sank. It sank in 1847. It was built very early in 1845. So it inspired great confidence in its passengers. This is the Krim de la Krem. This is the best ship that we could possibly get on. Although remember, it was modern for 1847. And that means you have a large hissing engine aboard an all wooden ship that is covered in oil-based paint and varnishes. So that kind of gives you a hint of what happens next. Around 2 a.m., the engines overheated and caught fire. There's a bit of a debate if it was the engine's fault or if it was a drunken crew's fault because the ship had been docked in Manitowoc before the final spot of its ship. And they were kind of rushed back onto the boat to get down to Sheboygan after having some fun in Manitowoc. So there's a bit of debate if it was a crew error or the engine error. But the engine caught fire. They had the fire spread very, very quickly. The middle of the night, so rescue workers weren't ready and alert and ready to deal with it. Phoenix only had two lifeboats on board. So unfortunately, about 270 people ended up perishing on Phoenix, making it one of the most tragic events ever in Great Lakes shipping. Yeah, there's also a few urban legends about Phoenix. One of those urban legends has to deal with the gold. Some of you may have heard this story before, but immigrants would typically transfer all of their money, their European money into gold before coming here because it was more easily spent in the US. When they went down, they had their gold on their person. So they went down with the ship, all of that gold. There's no record of ever finding that gold. So that's the mystery with Phoenix. There's a few speculative rumors about what happened to it. Some believe the first divers that went down to find Phoenix just took it all and didn't tell anybody, but it hasn't been confirmed. So I'm not gonna confirm that here today. I'm sure some of you have seen this as you drive down by the lake. This is a plaque honoring the Phoenix tragedy and telling you kind of the stories that I just shared with you there. A lesser known shipwreck and a less tragic shipwreck is the Walter B. Allen. This was part of the booming wheat trade of Sheboygan that I kind of told you about already. This one was built in 1866. It was a two-masted schooner, about 136 feet long, and this one could carry about 20,000 bushels of wheat. So that gives you an idea of how big this ship was. This one went ashore in about 1880. It was rescued by the tug Caroline Williams, but while it was being dragged back to shore, they realized there was really no saving it. So they just cut the boat loose, took the crew aboard the Caroline Williams, and let it sink to the bottom of the lake. Although what's unique about this ship is its sinking conditions make it a perfect research vessel. Because it had a pretty small hole and they chose to just let it sink, it sank very slowly, suffered very minimal damage, and you can kind of get a hint from this picture over here. It fell to the bottom of the lake perfectly upright. So the masts point directly up. It sits in about 165 feet of water now. With the masts pointing up, those masts reach about 80 feet below the surface. So it's a fairly easy dive for archaeologists, and it's in immaculate condition still to this day. So Shipwagon has a lot of shipwrecks just like this, not as good condition as Walter B. Allen, but a lot of very good research being done here in the area on shipwrecks. Oh, and here's the complete picture so you can get a better idea. These photos you can see were taken in 2008, about 130 years after the shipwreck, and this is still what it looks like. Lake Michigan is the perfect testing ground for diving these shipwrecks because we have very cold fresh water, which is perfect for preserving shipwrecks. I'm sure if you've seen the Titanic today, pictures of what the Titanic looks like, it certainly doesn't look like this. So we're very lucky to have the conditions that we have here in Lake Michigan. Oh, and here's the location of where Walter B. Allen is. Here's where the shipwreck is now. All right, the last story I have for you, Lottie Cooper, some of you might've seen this shipwreck today. It's been sticking around with us, but I'll give you a little bit of background on Lottie Cooper while it was still above the waves. I guess it still is kind of above the waves. Lottie Cooper was a hometown ship. It was built in 1876, it was 131 feet long. It was actually built in Manitowoc, but it was purchased by George Mattoon and W.D. Crocker, who owned the two largest chair factories in Sheboygan at the time. Lottie Cooper primarily shipped a lumber from Northern Wisconsin or Michigan into those chair factories. It suffered tragedy while it was doing the job. It was full of lumber coming into Sheboygan, 1894. It was caught in a gale from the Northwest, started taking on water. They tried to signal to the coast. They couldn't get there in time. The ship started falling apart and the crew were trying to balance on lumber to kind of keep themselves above the waves. The rescuers were able to get five of the crew out of the six, but one man did perish on the Lottie Cooper shipwreck. However, they did drag kind of the remains of Lottie Cooper back to shore. They didn't get it all the way and they kind of cut it free just shore to the shore and they lost it. They didn't know where Lottie Cooper was for a very long time. However, in 1992, they started building Sheboygan's wonderful marina and while they were doing that, they found the remains of the Lottie Cooper and somebody at that time decided they should bring it up to the surface, stick it across the street from the YMCA. So that's where it is right now. So if you wanna walk through a real shipwreck, you can do that now. I'm sure plenty of you have done that before, but if you haven't, I'd recommend checking it out. I wouldn't recommend doing this very often. This is not the ideal way to preserve shipwrecks, but now that it's up here, it is cool to look at. The best way to preserve shipwrecks is of course leaving them underneath the water, but this is a great learning tool for us now that it is up on the surface. So now I'll kind of wrap up my presentation here by talking a little bit about Sheboygan in the previous couple of decades and what Sheboygan shipping kind of looks like today. Shipbuilding as an industry largely moved out of Sheboygan by 1900. Of course, I talked about Ryeholtz leaving for Sturgeon Bay in 1896. That kind of put the nail in Sheboygan, in Sheboygan as a prominent place for shipbuilding, but that's not to say that shipbuilding wasn't a part of people's lives here in Sheboygan. This is a very familiar picture for people who have been to the museum in Manitowoc. These are all women welders during World War II with the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company. This is a crew that worked on the submarines that were coming out of Manitowoc and they always call them the Manitowoc women welders, but actually four out of these 10 women are from Sheboygan. So here I indicated in my notes which one here. So in the front row, we've got number one, number two and number four. Those three women are all from Sheboygan and then her in the back row right there. So those four are all Sheboygan women. So almost half of this team is from Sheboygan. They really should be Sheboygan's women welders. So a lot of them were traveling up to Manitowoc because these were very good, very high paying jobs that women were not only allowed, but encouraged to work during World War II. So that shipbuilding heritage is still living on, just not maybe within the city limits. Another important part of kind of the declining shipbuilding industry is Rees shrinking its footprint before moving on. So by the 1950s, despite Rees kind of having those booming years in the 1940s, it was becoming pretty obvious that coal was gonna be replaced by oil and natural gas. So while they tried to move into those industries, those industries weren't really to be placed here in Sheboygan. So they do have other facilities that they ended up moving to. A lot of their ships ended up staying on and working on the Great Lakes for a time, but a lot of those were ultimately sold off to Buffalo and some on the West Coast as well. So ultimately, Rees sold all of their ships to the American Steamship Company in 1969 and moved most of their facilities out of here as well, effectively ending that chapter of Sheboygan's shipbuilding history. Nowadays, the maritime industry in Sheboygan is primarily focused on charter fishing and the leisure tourism industry. So there still are a lot of leisure cruise lines and charter fishing opportunities and things like that. So kind of the most prominent thing coming out of Sheboygan's maritime history recently is just last year, this section of Lake Michigan, all the way up from about two rivers down to Port Washington, was designated a national marine sanctuary by NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Essentially what this means is it creates almost like a national park. It's a protected sanctuary as it specifically relates to the shipwrecks. So basically, this area will be receiving federal funding to keep those shipwrecks preserved, to increase study and educational opportunities on them, to increase tourism to this area so people can explore and interact with the shipwrecks. Also, NOAA is gonna be establishing a permanent research facility. They haven't decided which of the four cities will be hosting that yet, but that'll again host tourism opportunities, education opportunities, and more things that will highlight and enhance Sheboygan's maritime history. And then I have a little bit of, for more information, if there is anything you have more questions on, of course, I'll have time for questions, but if you wanna do a little bit more of your own research, Wisconsin Shipwrecks is a fantastic website. Every known shipwreck in Lake Michigan is recorded here with photographs and information about when it was built and things like that. Of course, I gotta plug our own museum here. This is our collections page. A lot of my images I used are from the collections page. A lot of great photographs in that collection. The Sheboygan County Historical Research Center is the other main source for my photographs. They also published this great book as well that I used for my research. It's called Sheboygan, A City Defined by Water, and it gives you about 150 years of Sheboygan maritime history and talks about lighthouses and the rescue crews and everything that I could not give you in a succinct presentation on a Tuesday night. Beth Dippel, who works for the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center, she's their director, has written a lot in the Sheboygan Sun about shipbuilding and shipping and things like that, so I highly recommend checking out those articles and kind of plugging another opportunity in the community here. The Sheboygan Yacht Club has been doing speaker series as well on Thursdays, so you don't have to miss these. So the last one's on March 15th at 615, and they're talking about diving shipwrecks and things like that. So that'll be another good speaker opportunity in the area. And just a shout out to thank you to this organization and my museum and the research center for making this presentation possible, and I'll open it up if there's any questions out there. But thanks for listening to me blabber on about boats for a while. Yes, sir. Where can I get a copy of the picture of the original project, Sheboygan River? Which one? The bird's eye view? This one here? Yeah. Oh, the 1836? This one here? This one, I believe, was also from the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center. I think I missed the citation on this slide, but yeah, this one was also from the Research Center. Do you have a favorite shipwreck or a shipwreck you found the most interesting? Yeah, a question I get from every student that comes to the Maritime Museum. It's gotta be about Simmons. I mean, the Christmas tree ship, for those of you who don't know, Vow Simmons is my favorite shipwreck. The museum has a Christmas tree ship day every year. I love the story. I love how we found it. I love kind of the preservation. So for those of you who don't know, the freshwater keeps things so well preserved that if you dive the Christmas tree ship today, it's still covered in Christmas trees, perfectly preserved Christmas trees. The front of the ship has one Christmas tree kind of right at the front, so it looks like it's decorated for Christmas. It just blows my mind when I see those pictures. So it's definitely Vow Simmons. But yes, good question. Thank you. Maybe Edmund Fitzgerald, non Lake Michigan, but Lake Michigan's Vow Simmons. Yes. Is it true that sailing ships more in the Wisconsin at the Sheboygan River as far upriver as 14th Street? Yeah, so I heard, I did see some stories about that. I wasn't able to confirm that for sure. Like so I couldn't see any photographs. I couldn't find a specific like factory or industry that they moored to up there. So I heard like 12th, 13th Street, but I wasn't able to like confirm, which is why I didn't throw it in there. Yeah. I have a drawing of a scooter sitting up near Frankie's Bar. If you know where that is. Can you tell us what that is? Is that a bus as far as for us? That would be about 19th. That would be about 20th Street. 20th and Indiana. Yeah. Oh. Wow. Have you gone diving? Love to, but I am a terrible swimmer. So until they create dive gear that allows for my dog paddle, it's not for me. I'm gonna let the experts do it. If you're from Sheboygan, you're pronouncing the Reese Cold Company, Lice Cold Company. So remember that for the next time. You're right. Now there was a question about how far off the river it went. The original Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge used to be a drawbridge, used to be golden. If it didn't bridge himself that far, it wouldn't. You're right. Actually the Jersey Avenue Bridge was a drawbridge also. Okay. They come across much in terms of the Naval Reserve Station that used to be by the East Street Bridge. And they had a ship station there for a while. Yeah. So I did read a little bit about that. Not as much as I would have liked to. Pretty early on when I was putting this together, I had like a list of like 20 topics that I could have talked about. And then I kind of cut it down to the ones that I think I had the most information on. So I've read a little bit about it. I'm far from an expert on it. But I can definitely point you in the direction of some good resources for it if you wanted to look a little bit more into it. Yeah. Do you understand that? Mm-hmm.