Twenty Feet from Shore: The 1915 Eastland Disaster on the Chicago River

On a bright summer morning in 1915, thousands of Chicago workers and their children crowded onto the SS Eastland for a company picnic—laughing, waving, expecting a day on the lake. Then, without ever leaving the dock, the ship began to lean. In the heart of the city, just twenty feet from shore, a celebration turned into a mass drowning as 844 people were trapped inside a vessel that rolled over in plain sight.

Twenty Feet from Shore tells this catastrophe from the ground up: the immigrant families of Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works who had everything to lose, the shipbuilders and owners who knew the Eastland had a dangerous history, and the officials whose post-Titanic safety rules helped make a fatally unstable ship even deadlier. As the list grows, ballast fails, mooring lines strain, and rescuers hack at the steel hull while screams rise from within, the story unfolds with the relentless momentum of a thriller—except every detail is true.

This is history at its most intimate and devastating: a rigorously researched, character-driven account of the deadliest single-event disaster in Great Lakes history, and of the city that mourned, blamed, and then slowly forgot. For readers who want narrative nonfiction that grips the heart as tightly as the mind, this is an American tragedy you will never unsee.

© 2026 NobleTrex Press (E-bog): 6610001257859

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 10. juni 2026