1880: The Year of the Great Storms

Description

When the Great Storm of 1880 is mentioned, one name rises above all others: Alpena.

The vanishing of the Goodrich Line paddlewheel steamer on October 16, swallowed by a sudden and ferocious gale on Lake Michigan, became one of the deadliest maritime disasters in Great Lakes History.  the loss was so profound that, despite dozens of other vessels destroyed, the storm itself would forever be remembered as the Alpena Storm

Yet across the water – and across the border – a very different memory endured.

Ask a Canadian mariner of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century about the Great Storm of 1880, and you would hear not of Lake Michigan or October, but of early November, Lake Ontario, and a tempest so violent in wrecke3d or crippled nearly every vessel caught on the open lake – and even some safely in port.

This book reveals a remarkable truth: there were two Great Storms in 1880.