- The Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975 – 48 years ago.
- A 1995 dive to recover the ship’s bell captured images of the wreckage 535 feet below Superior’s surface.
- Thanks to Gordon Lightfoot’s folk song about the ship, the freighter lives on in popular culture.
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald — the eponymous ship memorialized by Gordon Lightfoot in his 1976 folk song — sank in a November storm on Lake Superior 48 years ago this month.
The freighter Great Lakes crashed on November 10, 1975 in gale-force winds and strong waves, killing all 29 people on board.
Nearly five decades later, the Fitzgerald remains one of the most famous shipwrecks in American history, thanks in large part to Lightfoot’s six-minute song, released just months after the ship sank, describing the ship’s final hours.
During a dive to recover the ship’s bell in 1995, photographs were taken of the wreck on the bottom of Lake Superior.