Qualla: SS Cayuga

SS Cayuga: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Twenty-five minutes. That is how long the SS Cayuga took to slip beneath the surface of Lake Michigan after a wooden freighter punched a hole through her starboard side on the foggy morning of May 10, 1895. Built just six years earlier at the Globe Iron Works in Cleveland, she was one of the first steel-hulled freighters on the Great Lakes -- a symbol of the industrial future replacing the age of timber. Her crew escaped. Her cargo of oats and flour did not. And the story that followed her sinking -- five years of salvage attempts marked by decompression sickness, sunken barges, and at least one diver who never came back up -- proved almost as dramatic as the collision itself.

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SS Cayuga: Steel on the Cuyahoga

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The SS Cayuga took shape on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in 1889, the fourteenth steel vessel produced by the Globe Iron Works Company and the second of five identical sister ships. Named after Cayuga Creek in western New York, she was commissioned by Buffalo's Lehigh Valley T...

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SS Cayuga: A History of Close Calls

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cayuga seemed to attract trouble from her earliest days. On April 9, 1890, less than a year into her career, she left Buffalo harbor in tow of the tug S.W. Gee. A full gale was blowing. Clearing the breakwater, she became unmanageable, drifted onto a shoal, then smashed against r...

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SS Cayuga: Fog, Whistles, and Twenty-Five Minutes

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On May 10, 1895, Captain George Graser steered Cayuga toward Buffalo carrying 35,000 bushels of oats, flour, and general merchandise. A thick fog had settled over the northern reaches of Lake Michigan near Ile Aux Galets. Somewhere in that gray murk, the wooden freighter Joseph L...

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SS Cayuga: Captain Reid's Obsession

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Finding and raising Cayuga became an obsession. The underwriters posted a $1,000 reward. Captain Cyrus Sinclair located the wreck in June 1895 by dragging an anchor from the tug George W. Cuyler. In September, Captain James Reid of Bay City signed a $100,000 contract to raise the...

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SS Cayuga: An Underwater Museum

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cayuga lay forgotten until spring 1969, when divers John Steele and Gene Turner of Illinois rediscovered the wreck. She rests with a 35-degree port list southwest of Grays Reef Light, her stern intact, her bow broken away and lying on its side. The cabins are gone. Forward of the...

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