The Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down in a November 1975 storm that was immortalized in the Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," sank off Whitefish Point within 100 miles of the Western Reserve. There were no survivors.

Twenty years before the Titanic changed maritime history, another ship touted as the next great technological feat set sail on the Great Lakes. The Western Reserve was one of the first all-steel cargo ships to traverse the lakes.