Rock, Paper, Shipwreck! The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Thunder Bay

Abstract

Thunder Bay’s maritime cultural landscape affords a unique glimpse into a community’s heritage revealed through the natural environment and the cultural modifications to that landscape. For millennia, Thunder Bay and Lake Huron have been viewed as both barriers and avenues for sustenance, transport, and commerce. Changing seasons, water levels, and conditions have simultaneously provided and taken away opportunities to use the lake and its surrounding resources. Although sparsely settled by Native Americans and occasionally visited by French and British explorers, Thunder Bay was not inhabited by European Americans until the 1830s when fishermen settled the nearby islands. Lumbermen soon followed, and as fishing camps and sawmills were erected, so to were dams, piers, navigation aids, life-saving stations, and fleets of vessels. Thunder Bay’s landscape was continually altered to facilitate commerce, but eventual economic decline resulted in abandonment of onshore and submerged structures, and ships related to particular industries. Placing shipwrecks and other cultural features within the broader context of the maritime cultural landscape presents a more complete picture of Thunder Bay’s collective maritime past.