Today I ended up talking to a guy who had lived in Detroit but never heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I told him all about that good ship and true (and even sang the chorus of the song, which he had also never heard!) and he noted it down.
In return, he told me about the steamboat Arabia, which was a Missouri riverboat that was lost after the river changed course, and was dug up mostly intact in a farmer’s field outside Kansas City. It has the distinction (according to my new friend) of having the oldest known edible pickles (he swears one of the excavators ate some and checked).
It turns out that the Arabia museum will be closing this November! So everyone in the area go have a look!
The Arabia Steamboat Museum is a unique Kansas City attraction: a time capsule of life on the American frontier in the mid-19th century, and
