The SS Eastland Disaster That Killed 844

By | January 6, 2017

The Eastland was among the five boats transporting Western Electric workers with their families and friends to a park in Michigan City, Indiana, sailing across Lake Michigan.

With 2,500 people aboard, the SS Eastland turned onto its side over the Chicago River in July 1915, killing 844 people.

A hundred years passed after the boat upended, archival footage of the incident was unintentionally found by a graduate student recently.

The first-known footage of the Eastland disaster was discovered by Jeff Nichols, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois in Chicago, while scanning for unrelated material about World War I, the Chicago Tribune reported. Nichols explored the footage on Europeana’s 1914-1918 website.

H/T GettyImages