Arlington Hts. family helps bring historic Eastland footage to light
After working for more than 15 years to preserve artifacts related to the Eastland Disaster, an Arlington Heights family landed their most valuable find to date: the first known footage from the ship's sinking.
“It was completely unexpected,” said Ted Wachholz, executive director and chief historian of the Arlington Heights-based Eastland Disaster Historical Society. “This is actual film footage from Chicago's greatest loss of life tragedy, and it seemingly came out of nowhere.”
The tragedy occurred July 24, 1915, when thousands of people gathered along the Chicago River for Western Electric's fifth annual employee picnic. They boarded the SS Eastland, which was docked at the Clark Street Bridge.
Disaster struck when the ship rolled over before leaving the wharf's edge. Of the 2,500 passengers and crew members on board that day, 844 lost their lives.
Since 1998, the historical society has worked to collect photos, news clips and family stories about the passengers on that ship. While they have pursued numerous leads about film footage, they never turned up any results.
That is until Friday, when a pair of film clips — one a little more than a minute in length and the other, 30 seconds — turned up as a post on the society's Facebook page.
Jeff Nichols, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, came across the clips while doing research for his dissertation on Chicago during World War I.
He found them while searching World War I video, preserved at EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam, which houses one of the largest film collections in the world.
“We do know that footage of the disaster was widely distributed, but they degrade easily,” Nichols said Sunday. “So many films that have been considered lost turn up in far-flung archives and basements.”
One clip shows first responders walking on the overturned hull of the Eastland, pulling victims and survivors out through a gangway. The shorter one shows efforts to right the ship and remove it from the Chicago River.
“They're significant because they were shot in close proximity to the ship, not from across the river,” Wachholz said. “We think they were shot from a boat right next to the Eastland, and probably by an American film crew.”
The fact that the film dates back nearly 100 years, Wachholz added, puts it in the public domain and available for use in educating the public about the disaster.
“All this time, we've been searching for anything related to the Eastland in film footage,” Wachholz said. “Now, we've got a whole new angle to pursue. We'll start looking through more World War I videos to see if anything more turns up.”
As it is, Wachholz and society members are working with the city of Chicago to observe the tragedy's 100th anniversary this summer.
With more passenger (non-crew) fatalities than the Titanic, the Eastland disaster should have become a well-known part of local and U.S. history, Wachholz believes, but it still remains an obscure part of the city's history, somewhat shrouded in mystery.
He and the rest of the society members — including his wife, Barbara Decker Wachholz, and her sister, Susan Decker, who are granddaughters of a survivor — hope the 100th anniversary events and now film footage will help generate renewed interest.
“These clips may help researchers answer questions about the retrieval of passengers and the efforts to salvage the ship,” Nichols said. “More importantly, I hope these clips help viewers make an emotional connection to often forgotten tragedy.”
To see the video clips, and learn more about the Eastland, its passengers, survivors and first responders, visit the society's web site: eastlanddisaster.org/news/First-Known-Archived-Film-Footage-of-the-Eastland-Disaster-Located.