{"id":2206178,"date":"2025-12-20T01:41:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T01:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2206178"},"modified":"2025-12-20T01:41:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T01:41:06","slug":"life-ring-lifeboat-piece-from-edmund-fitzgerald-shipwreck-sell-at-auction-for-150000","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/life-ring-lifeboat-piece-from-edmund-fitzgerald-shipwreck-sell-at-auction-for-150000\/","title":{"rendered":"Life ring, lifeboat piece from Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck sell at auction for $150,000"},"content":{"rendered":"

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DETROIT<\/strong> \u2013 A life ring and a piece of a lifeboat from the Edmund Fitzgerald were sold at auction Friday for $150,000, a month after the 50th anniversary of the famous ship’s sinking<\/a> in Lake Superior with 29 men aboard.<\/p>\n

The relics were discovered by a carpenter in 1975 along the shore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There were no survivors when the ore carrier perished in a tremendous storm and plunged 535 feet (163 meters) to the lake bottom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m dumbfounded,\u201d longtime owner Larry Orr, 77, said. \u201cI never believed in a million years it would go for that much money. Shocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orr was curious about the shipwreck and found the life ring and a wood piece from a lifeboat while taking a break from his job, eight days after the \u201cFitz,\u201d as it was known, went down.<\/p>\n

The sale was handled by DuMouchelles, a Detroit auction house and art gallery that sits a block away from Mariners\u2019 Church, where a bell solemnly tolls on each anniversary of the sinking. The name of the buyer was not disclosed.<\/p>\n

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot<\/a> memorialized the ship in 1976 with an iconic ballad, \u201cThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.\u201d<\/p>\n

For decades, Orr, who lives in Yulee, Florida, had allowed a Michigan museum to display the artifacts. He said he decided to sell them because he needed money.<\/p>\n

Orr recently had agreed to give them to the state of Michigan as part of a $600,000 settlement in a completely unrelated misconduct lawsuit against state police. But the state agreed to return them after The Associated Press wrote about the strange deal.<\/a> The amount of Orr’s settlement didn’t change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.wsls.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DETROIT \u2013 A life ring and a piece of a lifeboat from the Edmund Fitzgerald were sold at auction Friday for $150,000, a month after the 50th anniversary of the famous ship’s sinking in Lake Superior with 29 men aboard. The relics were discovered by a carpenter in 1975 along the shore in Michigan’s Upper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2206179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[409890,21741,409889,425776,30188],"class_list":["post-2206178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-edmund-fitzgerald","tag-entertainment","tag-gordon-lightfoot","tag-larry-orr","tag-u-s-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Life-ring-lifeboat-piece-from-Edmund-Fitzgerald-shipwreck-sell-at.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2206178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2206180,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206178\/revisions\/2206180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2206179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2206178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2206178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2206178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}