Vermilion Helping State Promote Diving (VON)
Ohio is trying to educate people about tales behind the many shipwreck remains at the bottom of Lake Erie, in part to attract more divers.
Ohio officials are using photographs, newspaper articles and underwater video taken from records at the Peachman Lake Erie Shipwreck Research Center in Vermilion.
The material, along with firsthand accounts of the wrecks, is being displayed on a state-run Web site: www.ohioshipwrecks.org.
The state also hopes to build interactive kiosks at the Great Lakes Historical Society in Vermilion, the Steamship William G. Mather Maritime Museum in Cleveland and other places along the lake.
Roadside signs highlighting and explaining nearby shipwrecks will be raised along the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail, a national scenic byway.
The Peachman Lake Erie Shipwreck Research Center (PLESRC) is located on the grounds of The Great Lakes Historical Society, in the annex building behind the Inland Seas Maritime Museum. It is a user-friendly facility where researchers, students, and individuals with an avocational interest in shipwrecks and other maritime topics can use the resources within PLESRC for research purposes. Included within the Research Center is the leading-edge technology of an ArcView GIS system. Simply put, ArcView takes latitude and longitude positions and displays the ship location. It is the first time this process has been used to chart ship locations in Lake Erie. Linking with the traditional materials in PLESRC is the Clarence S. Metcalf Great Lakes Maritime Research Library.
The Center also serves as a focal point of organizing maritime archaeology workshops, documenting Lake Erie shipwrecks, and disseminating shipwreck information to the general public and specific user groups. In addition, the PLESRC serves as the headquarters for MAST, the Maritime Archaeological Survey Team, Inc., which is an avocational group dedicated to the documentation of Ohio's underwater historic resources. Since its start, the PLESRC has added to its immense collection of Lake Erie shipwreck information. Features include individual folders for over 2200 wrecks in Lake Erie, Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and the St. Clair River containing government documents, newspaper clippings, photographs, personal accounts, maps, and secondary sources, a library of over 300 publications relative to Lake Erie shipwrecks; and side-scan sonar images of shipwrecks in Lake Erie.
Estimates of shipwrecks in Lake Erie range from 1,400 to 8,000, while confirmed shipwreck locations only number around 277.
A project brochure will be available at maritime museums and visitor bureaus along the lake by the Memorial Day holiday.
Ohio's coastal management office contributed $4,500, and the Ohio Lake Erie Commission donated $10,000 to the project.