St. Clair River

This is where our story starts, in the easternmost city in Michigan, spitting distance from Ontario, Canada.

Port Huron lives near the intersection of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River, and a few blocks from the waterfront sits St. Clair County Community College, or SC4, as the locals call it.

The St. Clair County Community College is spread over an attractive twenty-six acre campus in Central Port Huron.

Day and evening classes offer-

Then, in the autumn of 1870, she encountered something considerably more serious.

On October 28th, while traveling down from Saginaw, the equinox collided with the barque Lafreniere in the St. Clair River.

Her cargo reportedly included salt and roughly 1.5 million shingles.

Still, after the collision, the cargo was no longer the most important thing aboard, because the equinox herself was going down.

The wooden steamer sank into the St. Clair River, and for many vessels of the period, that would have ended the story.

Recovering a sunken ship could be difficult and expensive, particularly if the hull had been badly damaged during the collision or while settling onto the bottom.

Yet the people who owned the Equinox apparently believed she was still worth saving, and only days after the accident, crews began bringing her back.

The disaster is especially haunting when you place it beside the equinox's earlier history.

Whereabouts is that in Ontario? Umjanong

First Nation is, it's actually just outside of Sarnia, which is a border town there along the St. Clair River.

Okay.

Yeah.

... on, uh, on August 5th through the 8th."

And you still could see some of those guys go in the St. Clair River and drift with the current-

Oh, sure.

Yeah

... have done that stuff.

Multiple times.

So we could see not only Huron, St. Clair River, St. Clair, Detroit River, and Erie all be a factor somehow, shape, or form.

All right.