SS Toledo

The SS TOLEDO was a 178-foot double-decked wooden-hulled passenger and freight steamer built in Buffalo, New York in 1854 by the Benjamin Buhl Jones shipyard.  TOLEDO was known as the “Pride of the Lakes” and one of the finest steamships in her day.  The 2-year-old vessel sank during a storm on Lake Michigan off the coast of Port Washington, Wisconsin on October 24, 1856.  The ship was departing the old pier at the Port Washington harbor bound for Milwaukee when a sudden fierce storm arose. About 100 yards from the pier, the intensity of the storm increased so that the vessel could no longer make headway.  The captain and crew attempted to drop anchor, but the chain got caught in the hawsepipe and could not be freed by the axe-wielding deckhands.  As the anchor hung uselessly off the bottom, the ship was driven on to the sand beach north of the harbor.  The TOLEDO broke up as the storm and Lake Michigan’s waves pounded the helpless vessel.  All but three of the passengers and crew perished. The bodies of those that perished were recovered and buried at Union Cemetery in Port Washington near the recovered TOLEDO’s anchor.  A deckhand named Samuel Welch clung to a piece of wreckage and was tossed onto the pier by the enormous waves.  Another deckhand named Aquilla Gifford and one other person survived. The unknow survivor had escaped in a lifeboat with 22 others but he alone survived.  For miles, the beach was strewn with the wreckage and the $100,000 cargo piled several feet high.

In September 1857, the boilers and engine were salvaged and delivered to Chicago. The anchor and some rigging was recovered in 1900 by Delos Smith of Port Washington while aboard his fish tug.  In 1965, the wreck of the TOLEDO was visited by legendary shipwreck explorer Butch Klopp of Port Washington.  On his first ever wreck dive, he swam to the remains of the TOLEDO from the beach.  On that dive, Butch recovered his first wreck artifact and began his 22-year exploration of shipwrecks.

Today the wreck, which lies in about 20 ft of water, is extremely broken up and scattered across a large area of the lakebed. Some of the deck, machinery and smokestack are still intact. Although not marked with a buoy due to the disintegration of the wreck, TOLEDO lies in the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast NMS in Ozaukee County at N43°23.05422′ W087°52.86342′.