Wreck Controversy
The wreck of the Superior City was initially discovered in 1972 by diver John Steele. The wreck was rediscovered in 1980 by Tom Farnquist and Gary Shumbarger of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society who extensively photographed the wreck. The Shipwreck Society produced a video in 1988 about the wreck of the Superior City called "Graveyard of the Great Lakes" that showed extensive footage of skeletons of the crew and the removal of a wedding ring from a skeleton. The Shipwreck Society still claims accolades for "Graveyard of the Great Lakes" video but they no longer sell it to the public.
The Evening News reported a Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment raid on the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and its offices that found evidence of 150 artifacts illegally removed from the state-claimed bottomlands. Artifacts from the Superior City and other shipwrecks are on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum as a loan from the state following a 1993 settlement agreement with the Michigan Department of State and Department of Natural Resources.
The controversy surrounding artifacts from the Superior City continued in 1996 over the ownership of her telegraph. The telegraph was on loan to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. When the owner’s representative, Great Lakes shipwreck diver Steve Harrington, removed the telegraph from the museum, the museum’s director, Tom Farnquist, notified the Michigan State Police who held the telegraph until ownership was determined. Both men admitted that the controversy really stemmed from proposed legislation over the photography of dead bodies in Michigan waters that included the wrecks of the Superior City and the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
For a number of years the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society used a wedding ring from a skeleton on the Superior City to promote its museum. In a 2000 interview Farnquist likened the identity of the skeleton and the owner of the wedding ring to a shipwreck mystery that may never be solved. The ring and other artifacts from the Superior City are still on display in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
Read more about this topic: SS Superior City
Famous quotes containing the words wreck and/or controversy:
“The old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most ... and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)