By Ken Wyatt
Todd Holton is the energetic Spring Arbor farmer who helped save the Concord Mill Pond last June when the dam failed. He is also an “Anniversary Man.” This year marks the 10th anniversary of his death, an account of which is detailed in a book that tells how he remains alive to tell about it.
But there’s another anniversary Holton has reason to remember: In a few days we’ll mark the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald during a Lake Superior gale. What’s that got to do with Holton? He and family members stood at the narrows of the St. Mary’s River and watched the Edmund Fitzgerald making its way up the river to the locks at Sault Ste. Marie just before its catastrophic loss in the evening of Nov. 10, 1975.
Today the two massive chunks of the great ship remain at 530 feet on the bottom of Lake Superior, 17 miles slightly northeast of Whitefish Point in Canadian waters. On Monday, Nov. 10, ceremonies will be held in remembrance of the maritime disaster that took the lives of 29 men. Along with those formalities, it is a fitting occasion to learn of one man’s experience.
Holton’s story in his own words: “I was 14 years old when my great grandfather, Frank Holton, wanted to travel back to the upper peninsula of Michigan to see the house that his father, Nathaniel, built in 1882. It was a two-story log home where the family lived.
“Frank was born there in 1883. In the fall of 1975, he was 91 years old and felt his time was short. So my father, Roy, myself, Frank and one of Frank’s daughters – Leola – traveled north across the Mackinac Bridge.
“We then traveled north to McCarron, where the Holtons settled in 1882 coming from Ontario, Canada, along with five or six other Canadian-Irish families. They settled in the area near the Neebish Island rock cut that was cut later (in early 1900) for freighters headed southbound.
“The log home was intact with two layers of siding over the original square-hewn, white pine logs… grandpa told stories of his childhood: Of clearing trees, stumps and picking stones till his hands bled; of losing a baby sibling and burying him out back by an apple tree; of him being born upstairs in the room on the right; of his dad keeping the peace over 14 children with a razor strap. “(Footnote: As we dismantled the structure in 1992 to relocate it on our farm in Concord, we found on a nail going down into the stone basement a razor strap on the backside of the beam).
“After climbing an abandoned fire tower across the gravel, dead-end road from the log house, I climbed up to take some photos of the 120-acre old Holton homestead. In the background one could see the St. Mary’s River. And in the photo – although small – one could see a large fighter moving ever so slowly upriver towards the Soo Locks.
“I climbed down and we all got in my dad’s van and went just south of the Soo to spend the night at great Uncle Martin Welsch’s house on the narrowest point of the St. Mary’s.
“As it was November, it was getting darker earlier, and Uncle Martin said, ‘Boys, come out on my dock to see my favorite Great Lakes freighter – she’s 729 feet long and a beautiful ship.’
“As it was high out of the water and close to us, the rail lights were on and looked like several of the longshoreman were gazing at us as we waved at them. We heard the low rumble of the Edmund Fitzgerald slowly cruising by – a mighty looking beast.
“Little did we know it was going on to Lake Superior to get a load of taconite pellets the next day and then sink in one of Superior’s biggest storms since 1913. Grandpa couldn’t believe that big ship could sink.
A few weeks ago, the Holton family honored Roy on his 90th birthday. It was Roy who, in 1960, at age 25 founded Spring Arbor Lumber Co.
Since that gathering at the Holton farm, Todd Holton and his wife Faith took two other family members on a trip back up North. A highlight of that trip was to visit the Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, where the recovered bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald is probably the best-known item in the collection. Afterward they went into Sault Ste. Marie, where they visited the Tower of History and other places.
Holton would like to take Roy to visit the Mariner’s Church in Detroit on next week’s 50th anniversary of the Fitzgerald’s loss. But whether there or back home on the farm in Spring Arbor, Holton – and all of us – can honor the memory of those 29 men and their doomed ship along with the late Gordon Lightfoot, whose well-known ballad concludes with these lines:
“In a musty old hall in Detroit, they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral
The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake, they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early.”
