In late November 1912, a three-masted schooner loaded 5,500 Christmas trees at the little harbor of Thompson, just west of Manistique, and set sail for Chicago. Her captain was famous down there. Children on the docks called him Captain Santa. The ship never arrived, and when divers finally found her on the bottom of Lake Michigan 59 years later, the Christmas trees were still in her hold. They are still there today.
Captain Santa
Herman Schuenemann had been bringing U.P. and northern Wisconsin trees to Chicago for decades, selling them straight off the deck at the Clark Street Bridge for fifty cents or a dollar, strung with electric lights and a tree lashed to the masthead. Families who could not pay got a tree anyway. His wife Barbara and their daughters wove wreaths and garlands beside him on the dock.
The trade had already cost the family dearly. Herman’s brother August went down with a tree schooner in a November storm in 1898. Herman kept sailing, and by 1912 he was 47 years into a life on the lakes, in debt, and betting everything on one more run.
The last run from Thompson
The Rouse Simmons was 44 years old that fall, tired and leaky, and Schuenemann packed her past any sensible limit with trees crammed into every corner. Storm warnings were flying and other ships stayed in port. Lore says rats were seen leaving the ship at the dock, and at least one sailor took the omen seriously and walked. She sailed from Thompson anyway on November 22, 1912.
The storm found her the next day. A surfman at the Kewaunee Life-Saving Station spotted a schooner about five miles out flying a distress signal, ice on her rigging and sails in tatters. The powered lifeboat sent from Two Rivers searched the raging lake and found nothing. The Rouse Simmons went down off Rawley Point with every man aboard, sixteen by most counts, including Schuenemann, his co-captain Charles Nelson, and lumberjacks who were only hitching a ride home for the holidays.
The lake gave back pieces
For decades afterward, Lake Michigan returned the story in fragments. Christmas trees washed onto beaches that December and tangled in fishing nets for years. A bottled note attributed to Schuenemann came ashore, ending with the words God help us. In 1924 a fisherman’s net brought up the captain’s wallet, wrapped in oilskin and intact after twelve years underwater. And in 1971, a Milwaukee diver searching for a different wreck found her instead, sitting upright in about 170 feet of water, her hold still packed with the skeletons of 5,500 Christmas trees.
Christmas came anyway
Here is the part of the story the U.P. should be proudest of. The next year, 1913, a schooner loaded Christmas trees at Thompson again. Barbara Schuenemann had taken over, vowing that Chicago would have its trees as long as the Schuenemanns lasted, and she and her daughters kept the tradition alive for another two decades. The lake never got another Schuenemann.
The tradition outlived them all. Every December, the Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw sails into Chicago loaded with donated trees for families in need, serving as the city’s official Christmas Ship in the Rouse Simmons’ honor. Divers lay a fresh evergreen on the wreck’s bow each fall. And at Thompson, a Michigan historic marker stands where the trees were loaded, a quiet U.P. roadside stop with one of the biggest stories on the lakes behind it.
Sixteen men, 5,500 trees, and a promise kept by a widow. The Christmas Tree Ship sailed from the U.P., and in every way that matters, she never stopped.
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Sources: Wikipedia ‘Rouse Simmons’; Manitowoc County Historical Society; Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary / Shipwreck Coast Friends; National Maritime Historical Society.
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