What happened to the Girl Diver of the Great Lakes?
CW: This story briefly deals with infant loss and domestic violence.
The retired mariner Captain Harris W. Baker died suddenly in the spring of 1923, after suffering a stroke on the porch of his daughter and son-in-law’s home on Van Dyke Avenue.
An obituary called him “one of the best-known men on the Great Lakes.” He had owned a whole fleet of ships that sailed lakes and oceans before he retired and sold them off in 1916.
But Capt. Baker was best known as a master wrecker. Baker and his crews had raised countless entire ships and their expensive cargos. The steamer City of Rome, sunk in the St. Clair Flats. The steamer Elder, raised from the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon. The Iron Duke, sunk near Charlotte, New York.
Captain Baker — known by his fellow mariners as “Skipper Pete,” for some reason — had made his name and his fortune using a technique called cofferdamming, which if I understand it correctly based on about 12 minutes of research involves building a second makeshift hull around the broken hull of your ship and then pumping out the water so the ship refloats.
In 1899, to great fanfare, he used a cofferdam to raise from the Detroit River the steamer W.B. Morley, which had sunk en route to Buffalo after colliding with the car ferry Landsdowne. (Yes! The Landsdowne that later became a floating restaurant owned in part by Four Top Duke Fakir!).
The sunken W.B. Morley, 1899. Via Library of Congress.
It may have been the first wreck to be raised using a cofferdam — every obituary for Capt. Baker, from Los Angeles to Boise, Tacoma to New York, said it was. It took eight and a half days and a crew of 27 men, including five divers, to raise the Morley and its load of 2,500 tons of anthracite coal. Detroit Free Press reporter Roy Moulton and an unnamed illustrator were on the scene to describe this major feat of marine engineering and the dangers involved to the divers who had to spike the cofferdam together underwater, squinting through the distorted glass of their diving helmets.
The journalists took lunch with Captain Baker on his wrecking ship, the T.W. Snook, on a meal of “spring chicken, iced watermelon, iced tea, prime roast beef and German fried potatoes,” Moulton wrote. “All were made welcome by Capt. Baker and his daughter Fannie, who is stewardess of the outfit.”
Oh, good. Fannie is here!
Because this is really a story about Fannie, with apologies for the 400-word wind-up about her dad. I was looking for Fannie in Captain Baker’s obituary. She is not mentioned, though her sisters, Emma and Grace, are listed as survivors.
Fannie did not survive Captain Baker. She had been dead for two years; I knew that going in. But Fannie, in her youth, had been well-known on the lakes in her own right, as one of the very few woman wreck divers of her day.
Would Capt. Baker’s obituary note, even in passing, the once-famous girl diver he had brought up? What did her death mean to him, in his last years? How had her family grieved? Why did her death go unmentioned — not only in her father's obituary but, so far as I can tell, anywhere? What happened to Fannie???
She was born — her given name was Frances — around 1884, in Detroit, and from a young age, she went along with Captain Baker on his wrecking trips. She would have been about 15 when Baker raised the wreck of the Morley, by which time she had a formal role in his operation.
Detroit Free Press illustration from August 20, 1899, of a diver preparing to go down to the wreck of the W.B. Morley.
Much of what was reported about Fannie during her lifetime comes from a June 1905 article in Women’s Home Companion by the adventure writer and Michigan man James Oliver Curwood, “The Girl Diver of the Great Lakes,” which you can read in full here. (It was anthologized by Victoria Brehm in The Women’s Great Lakes Reader, which is where I read it and how I ended up down this rabbit hole, and glad we are for that.)
“The ambition to become a diver matured in her day by day, and as she grew older she deplored the fate that had condemned her to be a girl,” Curwood writes. “But when she saw that women were becoming lawyers, architects, bankers, and even engineers, her determination to become a diver was fixed.”
Curwood says that she made her first dive somewhat impulsively to the wreck of a barge in Lake Huron, after the owner of the vessel asked her if Captain Baker would dive for a diamond ring that he had left in his cabin. “I’ll get it for you myself!” Fannie replies, and down she goes. She makes her way into the cabin, finds the ring where the owner said he left it, and brings it back up to the surface. The owner is so impressed that he gives her the ring as a token of his admiration.1
Curwood doesn’t say when this happened, or name the vessel or its owner, so it’s not possible to verify any of these details. Contemporary newspaper accounts relate no such tale, although Fannie was presented with a “beautiful diamond ring” at a huge banquet given at a St. Clair Flats hotel (we’ll come back to this) in 1903 “as a token of the work done by her father” to raise the burned-out wreck of the steamer Stimson from the Detroit River. Any role Fannie played on this job is unmentioned, but she’s 19 years old and not a man, so who knows if that has anything to do with why.
Anyway, Fannie wanted to be more than just a diver, Curwood writes; she wanted to be a leader. She “was fitted to be a captain of divers … Her plans for raising sunken ships and cargoes were daring, original and showed remarkable genius.” Curwood goes on to talk about how Fannie discovered a “treasure ship” (the treasure was copper) in Lake Erie. This is the wreck of the W.H. Stevens, which sank after a fire on its way to Buffalo. But various shipwreck sites offer conflicting information about who found the wreck of the Stevens. This one says the wreck was “found and then lost again several times over the years”; this one reports that some of the copper from the Stevens was salvaged by some contractor named Daniel Wilcox in 1904. I don’t really know what to make of any of this, and I don’t want to wade too far into the wreck-expert zone. Possibly lots of different wreckers scrapped copper from the Stevens over the years, Fannie among them.
Portrait of Frances Baker from the October 21, 1905 edition of the Montclair Times. Her necklace … !
Most newspaper coverage of Fannie Baker’s diving adventures in the early 1900s are cribbed from Curwood’s story, often word-for-word, not always with credit. Beyond those kinds of stories, she appears in the East River in New York in the fall of 1904, searching for a “box of valuable papers” that her uncle A.P. Baker “threw overboard from the burning excursion steamer General Slocum last summer.” Her uncle had since died, the newspaper mentions offhandedly. Sounds like the great opening scene of a mystery movie I’d for sure like to see! But takes us off track of the mystery presently at hand.
After 1905, Fannie slips out of the record almost entirely. My guess as to why: She got pregnant.
Joe Bedore’s Hotel on Harsen’s Island. Via Library of Congress.
In August 1906, Fannie Baker got married — to William Bedore, son of Joe Bedore, the famous hotelier of the St. Clair Flats, where we have already established that Capt. Baker & Co. spent a lot of time refloating wrecked ships and being feted. Six months later, in February 1907, Frances gave birth to a baby girl, Ananella Grace. The baby died three days later of hepatitis.
Fannie does make the paper one more time before her death, on the occasion of her divorce from William Bedore in the summer of 1913. The divorce was granted on the grounds of William’s “extreme cruelty” to Fannie: “Mrs. Bedore said that William had not been sober in two years; that he lost his Detroit saloon through drink, and that he had been cruel to her, once pushing her into the canal at the Flats.”2
I found her gravesite at Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit, buried next to Captain Baker and her mother, Nellie McKenzie. That wasn’t hard. But then I spent days and days banging my head against the wall trying to find an obituary or a death certificate for her, to try to understand where, how, and when exactly she died.
Finally, late last night, I had the basic-ass idea to check the other Detroit newspaper — the one that very recently employed me and in whose archives I used to do my own kind of salvage diving nearly every day.3 Two-newspaper-town problems! But here she is:
“Baker: March 14, 1921, suddenly at Cleveland, Ohio, Fannie, aged 36 years, eldest daughter of Captain H.W. and the late Nellie H. Baker and sister of Mrs. Walter F. Schaefer and Grace R. Baker. Funeral from residence, 1547 Cadillac Ave., Thursday morning at 10 o’clock.”
Except the date of death here may be wrong: The index of death certificates in Cuyahoga County lists Fannie L. Baker’s date of death as March 13. A hundred and three years ago today. 4
I still don’t know what she was doing in Cleveland, or how she died.5 One thing I’m pretty sure about: Fannie Baker never became the captain of her own wrecking crew. So far as I can tell, she never discovered another shipwreck. A divorced woman wreck diver who has lost a child — that’s some Edith Wharton shit, not a Woman’s Home Companion spread. Who knows if Fannie still had her family’s support, her father’s resources, a team to dive with after this chapter in her life. Maybe she didn’t want to anymore; maybe it was never really what she wanted in the first place. Maybe she was happy in Cleveland!! I wish I could know her better, and it frustrates me that I can’t — and it frustrates me that Fannie’s life was at once so extraordinary and also so infuriatingly ordinary in the way that it ended.
I find myself sort of skeptical of this account; would the contents of this cabin really have been completely undisturbed as they filled with water and descended to the lake floor? I don’t really know the physics of shipwrecks though!
William remarried in November of that year; his second wife outlived him.
For those of you who aren’t constantly looking up shit in old newspapers, the Detroit Free Press archives are easily digitally accessible at Newspapers dot com. The Detroit News archives are on NewsBank and require a library login. Often I forget to check them!
Incidentally, it is also my birthday! Just thought you should know.
I ordered a death certificate from the Ohio History Center so I expect to close the door on at least that part of this mystery in a couple of weeks, when it arrives in the mail. Will let you know!