Resident Spotlight

Meet Carrie Sowden

Discover this Rocky River resident’s passion for our Great Lake.

BY LINDA FEAGLER

It doesn’t take long for visitors of the National Museum of the Great Lakes to get swept away by the poignant stories Carrie Sowden shares about Lake Erie. Since becoming the Toledo museum’s archaeological director in 2004, the Rocky River resident has diligently studied centuries of shipwrecks and seafaring life.

The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 has become an iconic story, and singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot memorialized the Edmund Fitzgerald in his 1976 ode to the doomed freighter. But, Sowden is quick to add, every shipwreck has a story to tell — including those that happened on Lake Erie.

“Even people who live here don’t realize their importance to our country, and the rest of the continent, not only today, but in terms of history,” she says.

Sowden’s examples are riveting. One of the most heartbreaking is that of the G.P. Griffith, a passenger steamer bound for Toledo that sank in June 1850 after it caught fire 2 miles off of the shore of Lake Erie near Willowick. The captain, intent on saving as many lives as possible, changed course and inadvertently hit a sandbar less than a half-mile from the beach.

“More people moved west along the Great Lakes than they did in giant Conestoga wagon trains,” the archaeological director says. “The G.P. Griffith was mostly filled with immigrants who boarded in Buffalo, bound for a new life. They had everything they owned and were probably wearing lots of clothes when they jumped in the water, which weighed them down as they tried to survive.”

Upward of 300 passengers perished. It remains the largest loss of life on Lake Erie to date.

“So much of what I do is study tragedy,” Sowden says, “Along with the loss of life goes the loss of employment, the loss of commodities — and the safer boating regulations that have resulted.”

As the coordinator of the Maritime Archaeological Survey Team (MAST), a nonprofit group dedicated to documenting and scientifically studying the secrets of the deep, she’s participated in upward of 500 dives across the Great Lakes. Close to home, Sowden’s expertise led to a positive identification of the remains of the Lake Serpent, a schooner known to have sunk off the shores of Marblehead in 1829.

She also co-directed the excavation of the sidewheel steamer Anthony Wayne, which perished in waters close to Vermilion in 1850, and led the surveying team chosen to map the underwater site near Put-in-Bay where the Battle of Lake Erie was waged.

“Every site is different,” she says. “Sometimes, we record where objects are located. Other times, if pieces are not too fragile, we bring them to the surface (with state approval) after making sure we can properly care for them. If we don’t have the resources to do that, the best place for them is still at the bottom of the lake.”

Sowden earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Emory University in Atlanta and received her master’s degree in anthropology from Texas A&M University’s Nautical Archaeology Program. But to the archaeologist, who’s lived in Rocky River since 2007, there’s no place like home.

“It has a small-town feel, but it’s only 10 minutes away from Downtown Cleveland,” says Sowden, who enjoys spending time in Rocky River Reservation, partaking of the goodies at Ohio Pie Co. and dining at Herb’s Tavern. “It’s the kind of town where you know your neighbors and say hello to the mailman. I adore living here.”