0:01

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History

0:03

Class from houtworks dot com.

0:10

Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

0:13

I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry

0:16

Say. We have a Christmas episode,

0:18

a shipwreck episode, and a ghost

0:21

story all rold into

0:23

one thing, and that is the story

0:26

of the Christmas Tree Ship at

0:28

the Rouse Simmons which

0:30

thank in Lake Michigan while hauling

0:33

a load of Christmas trees to Chicago. That's

0:35

a really popular story in the Great Lakes region.

0:37

It's popular among Coastguard personnel

0:40

because the Coastguard is carrying on this tradition

0:42

today. Um, It's been the subject

0:44

of documentaries and histories and folk

0:46

tales and story books, and yet I

0:48

had never heard of it until

0:51

listener Alfred, and then many

0:53

other people requested

0:55

it. I'm not exaggerating when I say many many

0:57

other people. We've gotten literally to request for

1:00

this in the last twenty four hours. Yeah,

1:03

we and we've gotten several like throughout

1:05

the year. It's not always when Christmas is

1:08

is imminent, but as we approached

1:10

the holidays, it definitely ratchets up

1:12

in in uh frequency of

1:14

request. Yes, So we're

1:16

gonna start with a little background on three

1:18

things. The first is the captain

1:20

of the Rous Simmons, the next is the

1:22

Christmas Trees themselves, and then the

1:25

third is the ship that they were sailing on. And

1:27

we're going to kind of talk about those three things before

1:29

we talk about the actual event. So

1:32

Captain Hermann E. Schoeman was originally

1:34

from Wisconsin. He was one of six children,

1:37

and he was born around eighteen sixty five.

1:39

This was right at the peak of sail powered

1:41

shipping in the Great Lakes. He was growing

1:44

up as sail powered ships were being

1:46

supplanted by steam powered vessels,

1:49

and most of the sailing ships that stayed on the water

1:51

as steam took overhauled lumber.

1:54

Herman and his brother August moved

1:56

to Chicago when Herman was about twenty

1:58

years old. Chicago was home

2:00

to an extremely busy harbor where

2:03

they could try their hands at both sailing and

2:05

at other business ventures. On

2:08

April nine,

2:10

Herman married Barbara Schindel. They

2:12

had three daughters named Elsie, Hazel,

2:15

and Pearl, and those last two were twins.

2:18

Herman in August did pretty well for themselves,

2:21

but by far their most money

2:23

making time of the year was in November

2:25

and December when they sold Christmas trees.

2:29

So the use of evergreen bows to

2:31

decorate homes around the winter solstice is

2:33

a European tradition that goes back centuries.

2:36

Uh Then, in Germany, medieval Christians

2:39

began decorating evergreen trees with apples

2:41

to symbolize the Garden of Eden, and

2:43

this eventually morphed into the tradition of

2:46

Christmas trees as we know them now, where it stop

2:48

being apples and many other ornaments took their

2:50

places, and you eventually get what

2:52

we are used to seeing in homes today.

2:55

Decorating Christmas trees really

2:58

did not spread far beyond its

3:00

German roots until the eighteen forties

3:02

when Queen Victoria encouraged Prince

3:04

Albert, who was born in Germany,

3:06

to decorate a tree as he had done when he

3:08

was a child. Once a sketch

3:11

of the royal family next to their tree

3:13

appeared in the London News, Christmas

3:15

trees, as was unsurprising

3:18

when Queen Victoria did anything, became

3:20

extremely fashionable. She's quite a trend setter

3:22

in many regards. We've

3:24

talked about possibly doing an episode on just the

3:27

things that she set in motion in terms

3:29

of cultural popularity, But by

3:31

the late nineteenth century, decorating trees

3:33

had become a widely popular Christmas

3:35

activity in the United States, and

3:38

evergreen trees were in high demand

3:40

leading up to the holiday. To in Chicago

3:42

in particular, schooners laden

3:44

with Christmas trees arrived from Wisconsin

3:46

and northern Michigan, which were the nearest evergreen

3:49

forests. These

3:51

shipments came much later

3:53

in the season than your typical lumber

3:56

run or even your typical other shipping

3:58

across the Great Lakes, because

4:00

the objective was to deliver the trees

4:03

not too long before Christmas, but before

4:05

the absolute worst winter storms

4:08

made the Lake two hazardous to cross. This

4:10

meant that Christmas trees were traveling

4:12

on Lake Michigan as much as a month

4:15

after all of the rest of the shipping

4:17

operations had pretty much shut down for

4:19

the season, and there were

4:21

not that many people willing or able

4:23

to make this late season trip. Estimates

4:26

put the number it maybe a couple dozen

4:28

vessels, and included among these

4:31

were ones captained by the Schuneman brothers.

4:34

This is a job that Herman Schuneman

4:36

seems to have really genuinely enjoyed,

4:38

and he even continued to Hall

4:40

trees after his brother was killed

4:43

in a shipwreck doing that exact

4:45

thing. August Schuneman

4:47

was aboard the schooner s

4:49

Thal which broke up in a storm

4:51

near Glencoe, Illinois in November.

4:54

Of everyone

4:56

aboard the ship was lost. Most

4:59

likely the only reason that Herman was not

5:01

on board with his brother was because his

5:03

twin daughters were newborns at that time.

5:06

But after his brother's death, Herman Schunemann

5:09

kept hauling Christmas trees on a number

5:11

of different schooners. As he expanded

5:13

the Christmas tree business, he kept meeting to

5:16

go farther and farther north to get

5:18

better trees for less money. This

5:20

was great from a business perspective, it gave him

5:22

a bigger profit margin, but

5:24

the farther north he went, the more

5:26

likely he was to face really dangerous

5:28

weather. And he also

5:31

upgraded his vessels, working

5:33

his way up through larger, more stable vessels

5:36

that could hold more trees, and the last of

5:38

these, which he used for three years, was

5:40

the Rouse Simmons. The Rouse

5:42

Simmons was a two hundred five ton

5:45

three masted schooner which measured a hundred

5:47

and thirty two feet long and twenty seven

5:49

feet wide. It was licensed

5:51

and enrolled out of Milwaukee on August

5:54

eighteen sixty eight, and it was named after

5:56

a prominent merchant from Kenosha, Wisconsin,

6:00

who was one of the primary investors in the ship.

6:03

Like most captains, Schuman

6:05

couldn't afford to just buy a ship of his

6:08

own, so in Captain

6:10

Schuhman bought a partial share of the Ralph

6:12

Simmons, and that same year he established

6:15

a new business, the North Michigan Evergreen

6:17

Nursery. It's address was

6:19

the southwest corner of Clark Street Bridge,

6:22

which let him sell the trees directly from

6:24

the ship, rather than having to offload

6:26

them and then distribute them to grocers and other

6:28

resellers. He wasn't

6:31

the only person who was doing this. There

6:33

were other Christmas tree sellers who were uh

6:36

selling directly from their ships, and they would generally

6:38

decorate the ships and it would be a big production.

6:41

And like, getting to that part

6:43

of the story made me kind of wistful

6:45

that I didn't live in Chicago during this time, because

6:47

I think going down to the docks to

6:49

pick a Christmas tree off of a ship would

6:52

have been really cool. I would

6:54

love to hunt down some pictures of the decorated

6:56

ships if we can. Yeah,

6:58

I I as of as

7:01

as of when we're sitting here, have not been able to find

7:03

one that we can use. But I'm gonna keep looking um

7:07

So. By nineteen twelve,

7:10

shoot him On and Captain Charles Nelson

7:12

each owned an eighth of the roup.

7:14

Simmons and a businessman named

7:17

Man's Jay Bonner owned the remaining

7:19

three quarters of the ship, and by that

7:21

year Sheneman had also purchased two

7:23

hundred forty acres of land in Michigan,

7:26

who uses his own Christmas tree farm.

7:29

Even by cutting out the middleman and

7:31

owning his own farm, his margins

7:34

were still basically razor thin. He

7:36

had to transport as many trees

7:38

as possible to be able to pay the salaries

7:41

of the people who tended and cut the trees.

7:43

He also had to pay the crew and everyone

7:45

else involved in that chain, even though it was kind

7:47

of encapsulated. Even

7:50

so, he was an extremely generous man,

7:52

and he actually gave a lot of his trees away

7:55

to Chicago's poor, and

7:57

he became such a beloved figure during

7:59

this Chicago Christmas tree season that people started

8:02

calling him Captain Santa. He

8:04

seems to have loved this title, and he

8:06

kept Captain Santa newspaper clippings

8:09

in his wallet, which he wrapped an oil skin

8:11

while he was captaining the schooner to keep the

8:13

contents dry. So

8:17

we're about to get to the more sad part of the story,

8:21

so let's take a brief moment before we do.

8:23

That. Sounds like a smart plan, so to

8:25

return to the last voyage of the rows

8:27

Simmons and November of nineteen

8:30

twelve, shoot Himan had been doing late

8:32

season runs to haul Christmas trees

8:34

for almost thirty years,

8:36

so he was really experienced in doing

8:38

this. The rows Simmons had

8:41

also been on the water for more than forty

8:43

years, which was about twice as long as

8:45

the typical lifespan of a sail powered

8:48

ship at the time, so as

8:50

you might expect given its age, the ship

8:52

was not in great condition anymore. All

8:54

of those years of service,

8:56

especially the ones that were spent sailing

8:59

in stormy other had taken its hole

9:01

on it. The schooner left Thompson,

9:03

Michigan on November twenty two and nineteen

9:06

twelve with somewhere between three thousand and

9:08

five thousand Christmas trees. This

9:10

was too many to fit in the hold, so

9:13

many of them were arranged on the deck. Some

9:16

people who saw it leaveport described it as

9:18

looking like a floating forest. The

9:20

reason for being so overloaded was

9:22

that many of the region's Christmas tree farms

9:24

had been hammered by bad weather that year, and

9:26

trees were in particularly short supply. There's

9:30

a lot of stuff that we don't have really clear details

9:33

about, and one of those is that we

9:35

don't have a lot of concrete

9:37

information about exactly who was aboard

9:39

the Ralph Simmons for its final voyage.

9:42

We know Captain Schunemann was there, as

9:44

well as Captain Charles Nelson, each

9:46

of them owning an eighth of the ship. There

9:48

were also probably nine or ten other crew

9:51

aboard, and there are reports

9:53

that a party of lumberjacks had secured

9:55

passage to Chicago aboard the schooner.

9:58

None of this is document did very well. A

10:02

huge winter storm hit Lake Michigan

10:04

while the raw Simmons was en route. We

10:06

don't have a lot of information about what happened

10:09

between the schooner's departure on the twenty two

10:11

and to fifty p m. On the following day,

10:14

when a Surfman, which is uh

10:16

what you would call a member the Life Saving Service,

10:18

which would later become the U. S. Coastguard,

10:21

told his station keeper, Captain Nelson

10:23

Crate, that he'd spotted a ship heading south

10:26

and flying a distress signal. Captain

10:29

Crate tried to find a tug boat that

10:31

to go out and help the then unknown

10:34

schooner, but the vessel he

10:36

was after had actually already left

10:39

a few minutes later, he lost sight of the ship,

10:41

so he called the Two Rivers Life Saving

10:43

Station, which was the next station to the south,

10:46

to raise the alarm. He ordered

10:48

that they take their boat out to try

10:50

to meet the distressed vessel and offer

10:52

aid, and they did, heading

10:54

out to the approximate position where they should

10:57

have been able to meet the schooner, and

10:59

at first they had clear weather and good visibility,

11:01

but as it started to get dark the

11:04

gale blue in visibility

11:06

became extremely poor thanks to missed

11:08

and heavy snow, and the rescue crew

11:10

couldn't find any sign of the reported

11:12

schooner, and forty ft swells

11:14

meant that their own lives were then at risk. There

11:17

are tales that are break in the storm

11:19

allowed some of the rescuers to catch

11:22

a glimpse of a ship that looked like it

11:24

was completely encased in ice and

11:26

riding dangerously low in the water.

11:29

This is probably kind of a romantic

11:31

embellishment from later on. When

11:34

the Ralph Simmons didn't arrive in Chicago

11:36

has scheduled on the morning of November, Barbara

11:39

Shuneman and her daughters were naturally

11:41

worried that something had gone wrong, but

11:44

they held out hope that the captain had just pulled

11:46

into a safe harbor to wait out the storm.

11:49

This was something that he was known to do and

11:51

would be uh logical.

11:54

But sadly the schooner never

11:56

arrived, which made this Christmas

11:59

season are really somber one. In Chicago

12:01

that year, on December five, the

12:03

front page of the Chicago Tribune

12:05

read Christmas Ship lost on the

12:08

Lake with seventeen on board,

12:11

and soon after that Christmas tree

12:13

started washing up on shore near

12:15

two rivers. The saddest part

12:17

of the story is really the loss of life.

12:20

But that part just broke my heart when

12:22

I learned it. Uh

12:25

So, we're going to take another brief

12:27

moment before we get back to some

12:29

discussion about exactly what might have happened

12:31

to the to the ship and to the aftermath

12:34

of this whole wreck. So

12:37

there are several theories about exactly

12:39

what led to the loss of the Ralph Simmons,

12:42

along with all of its crew and its passengers.

12:45

One theory is that the ship lost its

12:47

wheel during this storm, although the wheel

12:50

has been brought up by divers. Another

12:53

is that the weight of all those Christmas trees

12:56

is just too much for the aging schooner to endure

12:58

once the storm got really bad, especially

13:01

considering that in that kind of storm,

13:04

the ship and the trees on the deck would have become

13:06

increasingly covered in heavy ice.

13:08

And uh, if you live

13:10

anywhere where icy weather is common, you

13:12

know how heavy

13:15

a giant load of ice can be. Oh.

13:17

Yes. A third theory is that Schuneman's

13:20

failure to have the ship recalked before

13:22

the nineteen twelve season was ultimately

13:24

his undoing. He'd had the ship

13:27

recalked the year before, and he probably

13:29

didn't do it in nineteen twelve because he didn't

13:31

have the money in the aftermath of

13:33

having been sued over non payment of

13:35

a debt. The

13:37

fourth theory is that a huge wave

13:40

caught the ship's anchor and kind of

13:42

launched it over the bowsprit

13:45

and that this momentum pulled the

13:47

bow of the ship under the water into

13:49

a dive it just couldn't recover from.

13:52

Fisherman did find a wallet wrapped

13:54

in oil skin belonging to Captain Schunman

13:57

in their nets in nine four.

14:00

Its contents were still intact and it was returned

14:02

to his family. A

14:04

diver named Kent Bell Richards found

14:07

the deck in nineteen seventy one while he was looking

14:09

for a completely different shipwreck, which

14:11

was the Vernon That was a much

14:13

larger ship that sank during a storm in eighteen

14:15

eighty seven. This is all kind of serendipitous.

14:18

He found the wreck by feeling it

14:21

after his cobbled together dive like malfunctioned

14:24

under the water. The Ralph

14:26

Simmons was in a hundred and seventy two ft

14:28

of water, about four and a half

14:30

miles from two rivers, and it was still

14:32

full of Christmas trees, Some of

14:34

the ones below the decks still had their needles

14:36

intact. This was

14:39

coincidentally not far from

14:41

where the Ralph Simmons nearly met its end

14:43

in a different storm in nineteen o five,

14:46

when its masks were thrown off in a gale.

14:48

In July and August of two thousand

14:51

six, there was an underwater archaeological

14:53

survey of the ship. It was conducted

14:55

by the Wisconsin Historical Society. They

14:57

found that the anchor chain and the math we're

15:00

all lying forward of the bow.

15:02

And so one possible explanation for this

15:04

would be that the bow of the ship became too heavy

15:07

and it took a nose dive. And another

15:09

is that the heavy items like the rigging and the chains

15:12

were all shoved forward as the

15:14

ship was sinking and then actually sank

15:16

for some other reason. So it's all basically

15:18

lends to support to the idea that it sank

15:20

nose first. We

15:23

don't have a lot more clarity about why

15:25

that happened. Divers

15:28

have pulled up a number of artifacts from the ship,

15:30

including its nameplates, and as we said

15:32

before, the wheel. Today it's

15:34

actually a popular stop for recreational

15:37

divers. In

15:39

nineteen thirteen, Chicago put up

15:41

its first Christmas tree and daily plaza

15:43

in memory of the Ralph Simmons and the crew.

15:46

More than a hundred thousand people came out on

15:49

Christmas Eve to pay tribute. There's

15:51

also a plaque in commemoration

15:53

on the Clark Street Bridge. In

15:56

spite of this tragedy, Barbara and her

15:58

daughters continued to sell Christmas tree is,

16:00

continuing to ship them by schooner for

16:02

a number of years, and the practice

16:04

of bringing Christmas trees into Chicago on

16:06

schooners actually stopped completely by

16:08

nineteen twenty. Sometime

16:11

in that window, the Schotamans started sending

16:13

the trees by train and then selling them

16:15

from a schooner in the port the

16:17

shoot. Him and daughters continued to sell trees from

16:19

the family's lot for a few years after

16:21

Barbara died in nineteen thirty three.

16:24

In December of nineteen thirty four, they

16:26

actually set up a Christmas tree shop in

16:28

Chicago that they called Captain and Mrs

16:30

Schunman's Daughters. That was the

16:32

only year that they did that. There

16:35

continue to be ghost stories about

16:37

the Rows Simmons that people saw

16:39

rats leaving its hole before it sets sail

16:41

in nineteen twelve, and that it continues

16:44

to sail the waters of Lake Michigan. People

16:46

also claim that they can smell the scent of

16:48

evergreens at Barbara Schumann's Chicago

16:51

grave site and today,

16:53

which is I think one of the reasons that people ask

16:55

us to do this episode so often the

16:58

US Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw

17:00

carries a load of more than a thousand

17:03

Christmas trees to Chicago every year

17:05

for distribution among Chicago's poor

17:08

in commemoration of the Rows Simmons.

17:10

So it's become this Chicago

17:12

tradition that has gone on for a

17:14

while. Uh, and I think some

17:17

of I know for sure this is not a thing. I

17:19

know for sure that some of the people who requested

17:21

it sort of wanted to know the story behind

17:23

this tradition without

17:26

already knowing that it involved the

17:29

a shipwreck with the loss of all aboard

17:32

writing Christmas time. So

17:35

now we know. You know, they're seemingly

17:37

fun in

17:39

a hurry. Yeah,

17:41

it's We've had a series lately where

17:43

in some cases we knew it was going to be

17:45

sad before we started, but we didn't realize how

17:48

sad, or in the case of this one, did

17:50

not really know that it was going to be sad, and then

17:52

it turned out sad. Uh.

17:54

Do you have unsad listener mail? Perhaps?

17:57

Do you have listener mail? I don't remember which

18:00

when I picked today and whether it is sad

18:02

or not, but but it is about shipwrecks

18:04

because it comes from our episode

18:07

about this submarine S five, which several

18:10

people have written to let me

18:12

know that a submarine is a

18:14

boat and

18:16

target the ship that it targets the ship,

18:19

so you don't call a submarine a ship, which I think we did

18:21

in the episode, because I didn't know that me

18:23

either. This is from Thomas,

18:26

and Thomas says I enjoyed the S five

18:28

episode and all the others too. Dying

18:30

in the water is probably my second biggest

18:32

fear of death two. But

18:34

first isn't drifting into outer space, which

18:37

is what I said. Mine was. It's

18:39

dying in a fire and would probably feel

18:41

about the same. I'm sure you've gotten all kinds

18:43

of feedback with various other great acts of calm

18:46

under fire prompted by the captain's

18:48

hell by compass comment. My favorite

18:50

is from Captain Al Haynes as he was

18:52

cleared to land United Flight two three two

18:55

in Sioux City, Iowa, July. As

18:59

with the sub commander's comment, one just needs a

19:01

little context to appreciate the gravity of

19:03

the situation, maybe in a

19:05

black hole being too recent to be part of quote

19:08

history and too far back for you

19:10

to remember so here is the high

19:12

level. The DC ten

19:14

heavy set out of Denver and had

19:16

two hundred and ninety six souls on board.

19:19

It was just beginning to be sequenced for its

19:21

arrival in Chicago. It was over

19:23

Iowa a catastrophic failure

19:26

rendered one of three engines and all

19:28

control surfaces inoperative. There

19:31

is no car analogy, because the car

19:33

lives in two D land, not three D and

19:36

can just stop. The closest you might

19:38

come is thinking about a car's steering

19:41

locking up and the accelerator being stuck

19:43

wide open, and you're leaning one way

19:45

or the other to try to influence the direction.

19:48

That is not an exaggeration. I heard

19:50

the captain speak in an aviation seminar.

19:53

He said that when they reached the base on the radio

19:55

to ask for help and describe the situation, the

19:57

base reassured them that they didn't under

20:00

stand what was wrong, because if the situation

20:02

was as they said, the plane would

20:04

have long since crashed. Compound

20:07

the situation with the next forty

20:09

minutes of pressure mounting as they bobbed

20:11

through the skies of Iowa. Able

20:13

to modestly control left hand

20:16

turns with engine differential, the

20:18

three guys in the cockpit carrying the

20:20

other two people's

20:23

lives in their hands. You

20:25

can see the desperation of the situation. So

20:28

finally, near the end of the ordeal with Sioux

20:30

City Insight, the air traffic

20:33

controller clears them to land quote

20:35

on any runway

20:37

and Captain Haines response, you

20:39

want to be particular and make it a runway.

20:41

Huh.

20:45

Some transcriptions add notation that there was

20:47

a chuckle in his voice. Anyway, that's my

20:50

favorite cool under fire quote.

20:53

By the way, his leadership in the event saved

20:55

over a hundred and eighty lives. Thank

20:58

you so much for sending this story, Thomas.

21:00

Although I was old enough during this event

21:03

that in theory I could have remembered it,

21:06

I do not remember it, probably because

21:08

for many years I had a phobia

21:10

of air travel and

21:12

I studiously avoided all

21:16

news about any kind of air

21:19

disaster. Um that which

21:21

I think. I think He's sent a separate

21:23

email that included uh, footage

21:26

of the crash itself, And even though I

21:28

am now able to fly and it's I'm

21:30

usually pretty okay, I was like, no, I'm

21:34

not looking at that. I

21:37

love that quotes there, So thank you so much, Thomas

21:39

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