It was 110 years ago today, at noon Eastern time, that Miss Alia E. Hawgood christened the new steamer Edwin F. Holmes, and the 440-foot hull of what is now the J.B. Ford slid sideways into the waters of the Black River in Lorain, Ohio, and floated for the first time.

The J.B. Ford, originally named Edwin F. Holmes, was one of seven nearly-identical ships built for the Hawgood fleets between 1902 and 1904.  She had the longest active career of any of these vessels, and is the last of them to survive afloat (the nearest runner-up was scrapped in 1974).  Only one other ship among the seven remains intact in any form today, and ironically, it's the shortest-lived of them all: the Etruria, a sunken wreck recently discovered on the bottom of Lake Huron.

The legend lives on, as Gordon Lightfoot so poetically put it, about that fateful night 36 years ago, when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior taking all 29 of her crew with her. But today marks another anniversary too. It was 98 years ago today that the Great Storm of 1913 began to subside after ravaging the Great Lakes region for several days, revealing its terrible aftermath. The steamer Charles S. Price was found floating upside-down in Lake Huron on November 10th, one of twelve ships lost with all hands during the storm.