Gregory L. Curtner
Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP
Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP
November 10, 1975. It is 50 years since the “gales of November came early” and the “pride of the American side” sank in the “big lake they call Gitche Gumee” carrying a “load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more” than the “Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.” Gordon Lightfoot published the timeless lyrics June 1, 1976, as a young Canadian folk singer whose life was forever entwined with the “witch of November” and “the wind in the wires.” Thanks to him and a solitary act of faith “all that remains” didn’t turn out to be only the “faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”
Father Richard W. Ingalls, Sr., the rector of Mariner’s Church of Detroit, heard the “the Fitz was in trouble” late that November evening. In the morning when the sinking was confirmed, he dressed and drove early to the church. Alone, he rang the massive bell once for each sailor lost and then prayed for each soul. A reporter and other press heard the bell and the story was born, soon making its way to Lightfoot.
Fifty years later, no one still knows “where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours,” but because in a “musty old hall in Detroit they prayed in the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral” and “the church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times,”, the “legend lives on.” That “musty old hall” is The Mariners’ Church of Detroit, which is not really musty. It still stands proudly on the banks of the Detroit River and is the second oldest stone building in the City, erected beginning in 1842. The bell still tolls twenty-nine times every November 10. Gordon presumably got his bell when he died May 1, 2023. The legends live on together, forever enshrined.
The Great Lakes contain over 6,000 shipwrecks and have claimed at least 30,000 lives. Mariners’ churches were an international movement in the 1800s when merchant shipping was widespread and wayfaring seamen were often in frontier cities far from home, in need, some thought, of religious attention and redemption from the temptations of developing urban life. Two sisters, Julia Anderson, the widow of Colonel John Anderson, commander of Fort Detroit, and Charlotte Taylor, had no heirs and wealth inherited from an uncle, who made his fortune in shipping in Jamaica (presumably in the slave trade), which was later invested wisely in Erie Canal Bonds. The will of Julia Anderson in 1842 directed that funds be used for the establishment of a stone mariners’ church in Detroit. The church opened in 1849 and is the oldest stone church in Detroit. Establishment churches in those days had closed pews owned by local families and strangers were not welcome. The pious sisters, supporting a worldwide religious movement, were concerned for the souls of the itinerant seamen. A few such establishments survive. The church also functioned as a stop on the Underground Railroad. A tunnel was discovered when it was moved in 1955 to its present location near the Detroit River.
Lightfoot’s epic song was an instant classic and made The Mariners’ Church of Detroit world famous. It was already unique. It had been founded to be an independent church for all people and was later incorporated by a special act of the Michigan Legislature, Public Act 142 of 1848, giving it perpetual status and an independent, self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. It had long been affiliated with the Episcopal Church, following the Anglican form of worship and precepts. As the Protestant Episcopal Church (PECUSA) in the United States moved away from its historic ties with the Church of England and became more progressive in the 1970’s and 1980’s, adopting an English language rather than Latin mass, supporting the ordination of women and non-traditional marriage, the Trustees of Mariners’ Church, including many prominent Detroit families, preferred their traditional ways.
In 1990, Mariner’s Church faced its own existential crisis. The progressive head of the Episcopal Church in Michigan, Bishop Wood, guided by and relying on a framework of canon law, moved to convert historic religious affiliation into legal ownership and control of Mariners’. The rector, Father Ingalls, a strong-willed force for independence, and the independent Board of Trustees resisted, insisting on their statutory independence and maintaining the Latin Mass. Ingalls was excommunicated and defrocked. PECUSA asserted legal control in its ecclesiastical tribunals under canon law.
A civil lawsuit followed in 1990. One of the undersigned’s partners, Steven Roach, also at Miller Canfield Paddock and Stone, the oldest Detroit firm, founded about the same time, in 1852, which had its first offices in the lower floors of Mariners’ Church, was a member of Mariners’ and brought me into the litigation. The case was heard by a Wayne County Circuit Court judge, who was amused by the idea that a self-serving new canon law and over a century of “religious affiliation” could triumph over a clear act of the legislature, ruled for independence in 1991. The Court of Appeals affirmed.
The case was marked by an encounter of heroic proportions. Bishop Wood announced that he would install a new rector at Mariners’. He approached the massive wooden doors on a Sunday afternoon with his large wooden shepherds’ crook prepared to rap three times to demand obeisance. The Trustees and Rector Ingalls, flanked by lawyers on one side and four Detroit Police officers on horses on the other, invited him in to worship, but when he declined they turned him away while the local TV evening news cameras captured the event.
Bishop Wood, made famous by his Quixotic loss, and forever also linked to Gordon Lightfoot, likewise died in 2023, in Harbor Springs, where his obituary recited from the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
“Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen”
The “legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee.” The bell is still rung every November at a service of remembrance for all lost on the Great Lakes.
No one could save that doomed ship, but Gordon Lightfoot, Father Ingalls and a clear public act saved the Mariner’s Church of Detroit.
Father Richard W. Ingalls, Sr., the rector of Mariner’s Church of Detroit, heard the “the Fitz was in trouble” late that November evening. In the morning when the sinking was confirmed, he dressed and drove early to the church. Alone, he rang the massive bell once for each sailor lost and then prayed for each soul. A reporter and other press heard the bell and the story was born, soon making its way to Lightfoot.
Fifty years later, no one still knows “where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours,” but because in a “musty old hall in Detroit they prayed in the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral” and “the church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times,”, the “legend lives on.” That “musty old hall” is The Mariners’ Church of Detroit, which is not really musty. It still stands proudly on the banks of the Detroit River and is the second oldest stone building in the City, erected beginning in 1842. The bell still tolls twenty-nine times every November 10. Gordon presumably got his bell when he died May 1, 2023. The legends live on together, forever enshrined.
The Great Lakes contain over 6,000 shipwrecks and have claimed at least 30,000 lives. Mariners’ churches were an international movement in the 1800s when merchant shipping was widespread and wayfaring seamen were often in frontier cities far from home, in need, some thought, of religious attention and redemption from the temptations of developing urban life. Two sisters, Julia Anderson, the widow of Colonel John Anderson, commander of Fort Detroit, and Charlotte Taylor, had no heirs and wealth inherited from an uncle, who made his fortune in shipping in Jamaica (presumably in the slave trade), which was later invested wisely in Erie Canal Bonds. The will of Julia Anderson in 1842 directed that funds be used for the establishment of a stone mariners’ church in Detroit. The church opened in 1849 and is the oldest stone church in Detroit. Establishment churches in those days had closed pews owned by local families and strangers were not welcome. The pious sisters, supporting a worldwide religious movement, were concerned for the souls of the itinerant seamen. A few such establishments survive. The church also functioned as a stop on the Underground Railroad. A tunnel was discovered when it was moved in 1955 to its present location near the Detroit River.
Lightfoot’s epic song was an instant classic and made The Mariners’ Church of Detroit world famous. It was already unique. It had been founded to be an independent church for all people and was later incorporated by a special act of the Michigan Legislature, Public Act 142 of 1848, giving it perpetual status and an independent, self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. It had long been affiliated with the Episcopal Church, following the Anglican form of worship and precepts. As the Protestant Episcopal Church (PECUSA) in the United States moved away from its historic ties with the Church of England and became more progressive in the 1970’s and 1980’s, adopting an English language rather than Latin mass, supporting the ordination of women and non-traditional marriage, the Trustees of Mariners’ Church, including many prominent Detroit families, preferred their traditional ways.
In 1990, Mariner’s Church faced its own existential crisis. The progressive head of the Episcopal Church in Michigan, Bishop Wood, guided by and relying on a framework of canon law, moved to convert historic religious affiliation into legal ownership and control of Mariners’. The rector, Father Ingalls, a strong-willed force for independence, and the independent Board of Trustees resisted, insisting on their statutory independence and maintaining the Latin Mass. Ingalls was excommunicated and defrocked. PECUSA asserted legal control in its ecclesiastical tribunals under canon law.
A civil lawsuit followed in 1990. One of the undersigned’s partners, Steven Roach, also at Miller Canfield Paddock and Stone, the oldest Detroit firm, founded about the same time, in 1852, which had its first offices in the lower floors of Mariners’ Church, was a member of Mariners’ and brought me into the litigation. The case was heard by a Wayne County Circuit Court judge, who was amused by the idea that a self-serving new canon law and over a century of “religious affiliation” could triumph over a clear act of the legislature, ruled for independence in 1991. The Court of Appeals affirmed.
The case was marked by an encounter of heroic proportions. Bishop Wood announced that he would install a new rector at Mariners’. He approached the massive wooden doors on a Sunday afternoon with his large wooden shepherds’ crook prepared to rap three times to demand obeisance. The Trustees and Rector Ingalls, flanked by lawyers on one side and four Detroit Police officers on horses on the other, invited him in to worship, but when he declined they turned him away while the local TV evening news cameras captured the event.
Bishop Wood, made famous by his Quixotic loss, and forever also linked to Gordon Lightfoot, likewise died in 2023, in Harbor Springs, where his obituary recited from the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
“Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen”
The “legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee.” The bell is still rung every November at a service of remembrance for all lost on the Great Lakes.
No one could save that doomed ship, but Gordon Lightfoot, Father Ingalls and a clear public act saved the Mariner’s Church of Detroit.
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