Great Lakes maritime lore lives on at Detroit's Dossin Great Lakes Museum

Detroit's Dossin Great Lakes Museum celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. We hadn't visited this museum along the Detroit River on the city's Belle Isle in quite some time, so we eagerly accepted an invitation to a reception at the museum celebrating the anniversary and the opening of two new exhibits.

Detroit's maritime museum originated aboard a wooden schooner called the J.T. Wing, which was the last commercial schooner sailing the Great Lakes before its retirement and 1949 opening as the Detroit Maritime Museum at Belle Isle.

The museum closed in 1956 due to the wooden ship's deterioration, but the city's Dossin family, owners of the legendary Miss Pepsi hydroplane racing boat, donated $125,000 to build a new maritime museum at the Detroit Riverfront site previously occupied by the old wooden schooner. Detroit's Historical Commission matched that donation, and the new museum building opened on July 24, 1960 with festivities including a christening with a champagne bottle containing water from all five Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior).

The Dossin family also donated one of the museum's first big exhibits, the speedy "Miss Pepsi". The racing boat won many races along the Detroit River, and was one of the first to reach over 100 m.p.h., but the family decided to retire her because there weren't any other boats at the time that provided a challenging match for racing. "Miss Pepsi" currently sits in a separate glass-enclosed section of the museum.

I loved the Dossin museum's mix of conventional museum exhibits and its more interactive elements where visitors could immerse themselves more fully into the maritime history and life of the Great Lakes.

A favorite museum exhibit for many visitors is the full-sized pilothouse where aspiring ships' captains can stand on the bridge of the William Clay Ford freighter, scan the Detroit River from a prime spot behind the ship's wheel, and check out the charts and ship equipment. My favorite thing at this exhibit was the small collection of lighthouse lens at the top of the stairs leading to the pilothouse.

I also loved the Gothic Room, a restored smoking lounge from of a Great Lakes cruise ship named the S.S. City of Detroit III. The ornate room features hand-carved oak woodwork and a three-panel, 700-piece stained glass window with a scene featuring the early French explorer LaSalle, who sailed the Great Lakes in the Griffon. The S.S. City of Detroit III, scrapped in 1955, sat in an Ohio barn until the Dossin Museum raised $15,000 to purchase it in 1965. Museum staffers spent two years refinishing the Gothic Room to its former glory.

Longtime metro Detroiters fondly remember the Boblo Island Amusement Park, open from 1898 until 1993 and the object of many favorite summertime memories for those of us lived for that ferry ride to the park aboard the huge Bob-Lo boats (yup, and I remember dancing to the polka bands during late night trips back home aboard the big boats). So, the museum's collection of Bob-Lo memorabilia was another favorite display for me.

The breezy spring evening we visited presented the perfect opportunity to check out the museum's outdoor exhibits, including a 12,290-pound bow anchor from the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald. The ship lost the anchor in the Detroit River a year before the tragic 1975 wreck and loss of all 29 crew members immortalized in the old Gordon Lightfoot song.

Be sure to check out the computer kiosk in the museum to see the day's scheduled freighter traffic. We caught the Charles M. Beeghly (named for a steel company executive and primarily employed in carrying taconite and coal) cruising by as we lingered at the riverfront.