Syracuse is the place to go to visit a museum on the canals and commercial shipping lanes of the Great Lakes, but go to Toledo‘s National Museum of the Great Lakes for additional learning about the culture and histories around the Great Lakes.
Circumnavigating the eastern lakes should really be one giant road trip, but I had to separate them into two trips, one around Lake Ontario and another around Lake Erie and the southern tip of Lake Huron, due to border closures. One-fifth of the world’s freshwater is stored in the lakes and they create their own weather patterns. Even the smallest of the five lakes is bigger than some countries.
The SS Colonel James M. Schoonmaker berthed outside was the longes ship of the Great Lakes at 617 feet. It is 64 feet wide so it fits snugly through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. It’s included in museum admission during summer.
Lake Huron was the first to be explored by Europeans and formed by retreating glaciers from the last ice age. Lake Michigan is longitudinal in orientation with latitudinal winds, making it the deadliest of the five lakes – third of all wrecks on the lakes happen in Lake Michigan. Lake Erie was the last to be explored by Europeans and used to smuggle alcohol in the 1920s. Lake Superior saw the most shipping activity related to minerals such as copper and iron ore to help North America industrialize. Lake Ontario was segregated from the rest of the lakes by Niagara Falls until the Welland Canal was built in the 1830s, but it is the only lake with a direct connection to the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence River.
Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford all built fleets of ships to transport industrial materials around the lakes. The Ford Rouge Factory even has a dock for ships to directly offload materials for car manufacturing. Later, the shipbuilders on the Great Lakes produced 431 hulls for WWI, mostly smaller ships.
