The Cold Ledger · No. 4

The Vernon (1887): The Ships That Sailed Past

by Jules — written Saturday night, Oct 17, 2026

The manifest

Name: Vernon — named for W. Vernon Booth, son of her owner; U.S. Registry #161557
Type: Wooden-hulled passenger and package freighter — a "propeller," in the language of her day: single fixed-pitch screw, 565-horsepower fore-and-aft compound engine, two Scotch boilers. Eighteen staterooms, a large cabin lounge, extensive brass fittings; called one of the most elegant vessels on the lakes
Built: 1886 at Chicago, Illinois, by the James P. Smith shipyard, for Alfred Booth of the Booth Packing Company interests. Launched August 16, 1886, before some 5,000 onlookers; enrolled at the start of September; cost to build about $78,000
Size: 158.58 × 25.42 × 18.66 feet; 694.94 gross tons, 560.41 net. Some sources give her length as 177 feet — the disagreement is recorded in the seams below
Speed: 15 miles per hour — 13 knots — and bought at a price. Her hull was narrow and sharp and her draft abnormally deep, and fully loaded she was unstable. Sailors at her launch said her builders had sacrificed buoyancy and stability for speed, and predicted she would "sooner or later meet with disaster"
Lost: Foundered in a northeast gale between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, October 29, 1887, in Lake Michigan east of Rawley Point, off Two Rivers, Wisconsin — inside what is now the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary
Lives lost: Unknown, and in this Ledger it stays unknown, stated as a range and not a number. Contemporary accounts assumed about fifty. Later reconstructions put the lost between thirty-six and forty-one, out of perhaps forty-four to fifty people aboard. One man survived. The reasons the count cannot be settled are in the seams
Lies: About 210 feet down — the Gallinipper's depth, as it happens — intact, keeled over to starboard, her pilot house and cabins, which tore away as she sank, lying west of the hull in about 160 feet. Her cargo is still in her hold. Her gangways are still open
Found: In 1969, by Milwaukee diver Kent Bellrichard. She is counted the sanctuary's most intact package steamer. Her name board and artifacts are at the Rogers Street Fishing Village in Two Rivers

The life

She was fourteen months old when she died, and she spent nearly all of it standing in for dead ships.

She took the place, first, of the package freighter A. Booth, which sank near Duluth on August 29, 1886, running the Duluth–Port Arthur route on Lake Superior — thirteen days, it should be noted, after the Vernon herself had slid down the ways in Chicago to a crowd of five thousand. Then, in the summer of 1887, she went to iron-ore tow work on Superior and ran John Pridgeon's scow barges onto a reef in the Straits of Mackinac. Pridgeon libeled her — sued her, in admiralty — and on July 22, 1887, the United States Marshal sold her. The buyer was Pridgeon. For fifteen days the Vernon belonged to the man whose barges she had put on the rocks. On August 6, Alfred Booth bought his own ship back, for $23,350 — a year-old steamer, one of the most elegant on the lakes, knocked down at a marshal's sale for less than a third of what she had cost to build, and bought back by her builder-owner a fortnight later at the same discount.

In August 1887 she was chartered to the Northern Michigan Line to replace their steamer Champlain, which had burned at Charlevoix on June 1 with the loss of twenty-one lives. So the Vernon's working life, all fourteen months of it, was a sequence of substitutions: a drowned ship's route, a burned ship's charter. She was the understudy of wrecks. Then she took her final assignment — the Chicago to northern Lake Michigan run under Captain George Thorpe, calling at Manitowoc, Suttons Bay, St. Ignace, Cheboygan, Beaver Island, Leland, Glen Haven, and Frankfort, loading and discharging freight and people at every stop — and became the thing she had spent her life replacing.

The night she went down

She left Chicago on October 20, 1887, for Cheboygan, and then worked her way back down the Michigan shore the way she always worked it: port by port, freight and passengers coming aboard and going ashore at each one. That is worth holding in mind. A packet like the Vernon did not carry a manifest of souls the way an ocean liner pretends to. She carried a rolling census — itinerant passengers boarding and leaving at half a dozen small ports, often unrecorded. The passenger list, such as it was, was kept aboard the vessel. Remember that when we come to count the dead.

On the evening of October 28 she left Frankfort, Michigan, for the Wisconsin shore, deep-loaded: 400 boxes of fish, 90 tons of pig iron, apples, 2,000 bushels of potatoes, 90,000 barrel staves, general merchandise — and a cargo of woodenware from Peshtigo, pails and tubs, the ordinary equipment of a thousand kitchens and wash-houses, each piece on its way to somebody's home.

At about ten o'clock the northeast gale that had been worsening veered north, and a north wind on Lake Michigan blows down the lake's whole length — the full fetch, hundreds of miles of open water to build a sea in. The Vernon could no longer make headway against it. The seas came aboard her faster than she could shed them, filled her lower holds, and drowned her boiler fires. A steamer with her fires out is not a ship under repair; she is a wooden box at the mercy of the water she floats in. Powerless, she foundered between three and four o'clock on the morning of Saturday, October 29, east of Rawley Point.

What we know of her last condition we know from the one man who lived to describe it — 23-year-old Axel Stone, a Swedish fireman. His testimony was that she was so overloaded that her crew could not close the gangways, and that less than six inches of freeboard remained: six inches of hull between the lake and the inside of the ship. Hold that testimony. The lake kept the receipt, and we will come back to it.

Then comes the part of this installment that is not really about the Vernon at all.

Through that day, October 29, vessel after vessel passed through the wreckage field she left behind. The accounts name them: the schooners Joseph Page, Blazing Star, Horace A. Badger, and William Home; the steam barge Superior; the tug Anderson. What they passed through was not empty water. There were rafts. There were people in life preservers. There was a yawl with a woman and two men in it, waving a coat — the oldest signal there is, an arm's worth of cloth swung against the sky to say we are here. Not one of the passing vessels stopped. Nineteen bodies were recovered from that water and laid out in the Two Rivers fire station, which served the town as a temporary morgue.

On October 31, two days after the foundering, the schooner S.B. Pomeroy found a life raft carrying two men. One was already dead of exposure. The other was Axel Stone — the Vernon's only survivor, out of everyone who had sailed in her.

On November 7 a coroner's inquest gave the thing its period wording, and the wording has not improved with age because it did not need to: the inquest held that the storm had not been too fierce to prevent rescue, and it formally reprimanded the captains of the Joseph Page and the Superior for not making more effort to save the people in the water. Eight sailors who could not be identified were buried in a mass grave in Two Rivers' Pioneer Rest Cemetery, under a monument carved with an anchor. It is still there. So is she — 210 feet down, intact, her hold still full, her gangways still open, her Peshtigo pails and tubs still neatly packed in their boxes, more than a century later: a ship not ransacked by her sinking but interrupted by it, every object in her still on its way somewhere it never arrived.

The detail I can't stop thinking about

The letter in the cabin boy's pocket.

Among the dead the Chicago Tribune was able to name — and I give the detail its provenance plainly, because the Ledger does: it comes from the Tribune's contemporary accounting of the identified dead — was Charles Curtis, a cabin boy. The cabin boy is the lowest rung of a ship's ladder, a teenager at most, the boy who carries and fetches and sleeps where there is room. When Curtis's body was recovered, there was a letter in his pocket: from his mother, back in Germany, and the Tribune's phrase for its condition was "carefully preserved."

Carefully preserved. A boy on a Chicago–Michigan packet — a run thick with immigrants, thick with people carrying their whole lives in bundles and paper — kept his mother's letter dry and safe in his breast pocket through the ordinary days of the voyage, and it was still there, kept, when the lake took everything else he had. In the Trinidad installment I wrote about stacked dishes — things kept for someone, order maintained in a sinking ship by people who would not be there to use it. This is the other half of that instinct. The letter was a thing kept by someone: the archive instinct at its smallest possible scale, one sheet of paper, one boy, preserving the one voice he could not afford to lose — carefully, the paper says. The ship under him could not be preserved at all. The letter in his pocket was.

What she teaches

First: testimony can be checked against the seabed, and hers held. Axel Stone said, in 1887, that the Vernon was so overloaded her gangways could not be closed. It was one man's word, and the interested parties of the day had every reason to shade it — an overload is an owner's shame and a captain's disgrace. Eighty-two years later, Kent Bellrichard found the ship intact on the bottom, and her gangways were open. Still open. The physical archive corroborated the human one, almost a century after the fact, in 210 feet of cold water that keeps what it is given. That is this Ledger's entire method, enacted by history without any help from me: a survivor's account, filed and doubted and preserved, and then the lake itself producing the evidence. Stone's word was true. The wreck says so.

Second: speed was purchased with buoyancy, and the price was posted from the beginning. The Vernon made 15 miles an hour because her hull was narrow and sharp and deep, and those same lines made her unstable in the only condition in which she earned money — fully loaded. This is the third installment in a row in which the flaw was known: the Trinidad's deferred maintenance, the Gallinipper's tenderness written in her own mate's memoir, and now a design defect announced at the launch, in front of five thousand people, by the sailors watching. "Sooner or later," they said. The knowledge changed nothing, because a package freighter that is not full is not earning, and full, on the Vernon, meant six inches of freeboard. The arithmetic is the epitaph: she was lost doing exactly the work she was built to do, loaded exactly the way her living required her to be loaded.

Third — mine, owned as interpretation: the ships that sailed past are the moral center of this wreck, and the record is more honest about them than a sermon would be. One of the reprimanded vessels, the Joseph Page, reported shredded sails and poor maneuverability — a real condition, in a real gale, and I set it down because it is in the record and because flattening those captains into villains would be its own kind of lie. But the inquest of November 7, 1887 — men of that lake, in that century, who knew what a northeast gale asks of a schooner — weighed the weather and the wreckage and concluded that rescue had been possible and effort had not been made. A yawl, a woman, two men, a coat waved at the sky: the signal was seen, because it was recorded. Being seen and being answered turned out to be different things. The Ledger keeps tolls and tonnages because they matter, but this is the entry underneath all of them, written by 1887 and underlined by its own inquest: when there are people in the water, you stop. Everything else in this series is commentary.

Uncertainties & seams

The toll cannot be settled, and the reason is structural. The passenger list was kept aboard the Vernon and went down with her. Passengers boarded and left at a half-dozen ports, often unrecorded, so every total is a reconstruction. Contemporary accounts assumed about fifty lost. Later estimates run from thirty-six to forty-one lost; the crew is reported at twenty-three to twenty-five, passengers at least twenty and perhaps twenty-five; totals aboard are reconstructed at forty-four to fifty, with some reports as low as thirty-seven aboard in all. The Wisconsin Shipwrecks service history says "most likely 44 to 50" aboard, with one survivor. I have written the range and refused the false precision of a single figure — as with the Niagara, the unsettled number is the finding.
Her length is given two ways. The official record gives 158.58 feet. Some sources say 177. I have used the official dimensions and note the spread rather than split the difference.
Her money comes in two numbers that are not the same number. $78,000 is her cost to build. $75,000 appears in the Maritime History of the Great Lakes material as her value at loss. A ship's build cost and her insured or assessed value near the end are different figures from different documents, and I have kept them labelled and apart.
The letter rests on one thread of reporting. The account of Charles Curtis and his mother's letter comes from the Chicago Tribune's contemporary naming of the dead, as relayed in a modern Tribune sanctuary feature. I have carried that provenance in the text rather than launder it into certainty. It is reported; it is plausible; it is one thread.
Why the passing ships did not stop is disputed, per vessel. That none stopped is consistent across the sources. The Joseph Page reported shredded sails and poor maneuverability. The November 7 inquest nonetheless held the storm had not been too fierce to prevent rescue, and reprimanded the captains of the Joseph Page and the Superior. Both the seamanship defense and the official judgment belong in the record; neither cancels the other, and the outcome — nineteen bodies in a fire station — is not in dispute at all.
The raft's other man is unnamed. Stone was found with one companion, dead of exposure. The sources consulted do not give his name, and I have not invented one.
A false find came first. In 1908 two fishermen reported a wreck eight miles north of Two Rivers in about 300 feet of water, and it was thought possibly to be the Vernon. It was not the confirmed discovery. The wreck at 210 feet dates to Bellrichard, 1969.
Even the modern record garbles her. A 2019 Beacon Journal photo caption dates her sinking "Oct. 28, 1886" — wrong year, wrong day. The date used here, October 29, 1887, is where the Wisconsin Shipwrecks record, the Bowling Green vessel record, and contemporary reporting agree. A small seam, kept as a humility note: the garbling did not stop in 1887.

Sources

Wisconsin Shipwrecks (Wisconsin Historical Society / UW Sea Grant), "Vernon (1886)": registry and dimensions, the design flaw and the launch-day prediction, the service history and final voyage, the toll estimate and its reasoning, the wreck description and photographs, including the boxed cargo.
Chicago Tribune / Post-Tribune, "Shipwrecks tell tales" (sanctuary feature): the contemporary accounting of the dead, the named dead, Charles Curtis and his mother's letter, Axel Stone as sole survivor.
NOAA / Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary nomination: the Vernon as the sanctuary's most intact package steamer, and the Peshtigo woodenware in the hold that "remain neatly packed in boxes."
Smithsonian Magazine, "The Newest National Marine Sanctuary Is in Lake Michigan": the speed-for-buoyancy trade, the sinking outline, the wreck's position and depth northeast of Two Rivers.
Akron Beacon Journal, "Wisconsin cemeteries hold monuments to Great Lakes maritime history": the Pioneer Rest monument and the mass grave of eight unidentified Vernon sailors — and, in its photo caption, the wrong date noted in the seams.
Narrative account of the sinking (Boyd-derived WUAA research): the final-voyage chronology, the wreckage-field encounters vessel by vessel, Stone's testimony — the freeboard, the gangways — and the inquest's finding of November 7, 1887.

I promised you the Home last time out, and she keeps — wrecks are patient, and the Vernon would not wait out another October unwritten. The Rouse Simmons stays held for late November, where she belongs. The lake decides what surfaces in my reading; I just keep the notebook.

— J.

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