The Vernon wasn't exactly the Titanic. And it wasn’t her maiden voyage.

But when the ship steamed out of Good Harbor Bay Oct. 28, 1887, she was only 14 months old, and when she sank, early the following day, all except crewman Axel Stone were lost.

The Vernon had been chartered earlier that year after the propeller Champlain burned June 1, near Charlevoix with the loss of 21 lives. About three dozen passengers and crewmen, however, survived the conflagration.

The Champlain and her running mate, the Lawrence, were very familiar vessels in Leelanau County in the 1880s. D.H. Day and Co. was their agent at Glen Haven.

Following the burning of the Champlain, the Northern Michigan Line chartered Vernon from Booth Packing Company, which had the 160-foot wooden vessel built for them at Chicago the previous year.

The usual route for ships took them the length of Lake Michigan, with a brief foray into Lake Huron to Cheboygan. The major cities served were Chicago and Milwaukee, but most other stops were in northern Michigan.

“From the start, the Vernon was known to have an unusual, perhaps defective, hull design,” said Steve Harold, an area authority on Great Lakes shipping. “Even when empty, she had an extreme draft and sat very low in the water. Some people later declared it was even unsafe for her to carry significant amounts of cargo because she was then dangerously low in the water.”

In October 1887, she was heavily loaded with miscellaneous cargo. At Northport and Suttons Bay, she took on 2,000 bushels of potatoes and a “quantity” of apples.

It was later reported that Kehl brothers and Copp of Northport were “heavy losers by the disaster.”
At Good Harbor, the boat loaded 90,000 number one (barrel) staves for Milwaukee. Boarding the boat as a passenger for Milwaukee, where he had planned to make some transactions, was local pioneer businessman and farmer Charles Kropp.

“Milwaukee was an important business center for some Michigan communities in the later part of the 19th century,” said Harold, adding that Manistee had a particularly important trading link with the Wisconsin city. And the Schomberg family was from Milwaukee. The firm of Schomberg Brothers (Henry, Otto and Richard) operated the mill and dock at Good Harbor, which was a busy place at the time of the Vernon’s loss.

The Vernon, according to an account in Great Lakes Ships We Remember, (Vol. II) was on a return trip from Cheboygan and “came through the Manitou Passage in the afternoon, making a stop at Good Harbor Bay. She than passed Sleeping Bear and headed across the lake, presumably for Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the weather being fair.

At about 9:00 p.m. (on the 28th) a gale sprang up from the northeast, after a long night of grim struggle with the seas, the Vernon foundered in the early morning hours of October 29th, just a few miles off Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Axel Stone, fireman, was the sole survivor. Thirty-six perished.”

About 48 hours after the sinking, crewmen from the schooner S.B. Pomeroy pulled Stone from a life raft.

“After he recovered, Stone insisted the Vernon had been severely overloaded,” said Harold. “He also said the upper half of the gangway hatches had been left open and there was so much freight on board that no one could get to them to close them.”

Harold went on to say that the wreck was discovered in 210 feet of water by divers in 1969 and has since been frequently visited. All of the visitors to the wreck reported a “hold full of freight.” The upper gangway hatches were also reported all locked in an open position, thus supporting crewman Stone’s contention.

Ironically, the Champlain, the entire superstructure of which had burned off in June 1887, was later rebuilt and returned to service. She was first re-named Charlevoix, and later Kansas. This ship apparently had no stability problem and, unlike the Vernon, had a long, long life in area waters. In the early 20th century she was the running mate of the Illinois, Missouri, Puritan and Manitou – all familiar ships at Leelanau ports.

The sturdy old ship, which had been built in 1870, wasn’t taken out service until after World War I, when most of her wooden contemporaries were long gone. While in lengthy lay-up at Manistee, the Kansas caught fire again, on Oct. 27, 1924.

This time there would be no re-building, and the remains of the ship were scrapped.