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By Georgia Kerrigan ’27

After 5 years of storage in University Archives, a plaque memorializing 19th-century student Edward Spencer now hangs on the north wall of the Sailing Center – a fitting location and commemoration for a man credited with rescuing 17 people from a disastrous shipwreck.

Though the plaque was originally unveiled in Lunt Library in 1898, it has undergone several location changes since then, eventually being tucked into storage after a 2019 renovation in Patten Gymnasium. The new home puts it in a much more publicly visible location to commemorate a 164-year-old act of heroism.

Spencer, credited with attending both Northwestern and the Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary), worked as an unofficial coastal life-saver in 1860. This volunteer role was especially necessary at the time, because official life-saving stations would not be developed until 16 years – and several shipwrecks – after the event that made Spencer a hero. 

On Sept. 7, 1860, 398 passengers boarded the Lady Elgin, a steamboat on its ninth year of successful passenger and cargo transportation between Chicago and Superior, Wisconsin. Those aboard had just attended a campaign speech delivered in Chicago by Sen. Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in the 1860 presidential election. The ship was northbound along the choppy waters of Lake Michigan when it collided with a significantly smaller schooner, the Augusta, shortly after 2 a.m.

Outside the Northwestern Sailing Center

In less than half an hour, the ship’s engine fell through the hull, and the Lady Elgin quickly nosedived with only a fraction of its passengers evacuated on lifeboats, others clinging to wreckage, trying to escape the dangerous currents.

As word spread along the coast, eventually reaching Northwestern, rescuers and onlookers congregated on the shore. They were soon joined by Edward Spencer, and thus began a six-hour life-saving endeavor. Spencer, carrying a rope to some and carrying others to shore, made 16 trips in total to rescue 17 of the 30 total surviving passengers. After the ordeal, witnesses recall Spencer, in an exhausted delirium, invoking a query that has since immortalized his legacy: “Did I do my best?”

These words, which would be the focal point of every subsequent account of Spencer and the shipwreck, gained particular regard perhaps for reflecting contemporary Victorian ideals about morality and conduct.

This might be why, 38 years after that night, the class of 1898 took such an interest in Spencer that it donated the 4-by-3-foot, solid brass plaque to the University as a class gift. At a 10th year reunion event in 1908, a class member gave an impassioned speech that continued to extol Spencer as “a slender youth, but an expert swimmer, endowed with wonderful powers of endurance, and with dauntless courage.” 

Whatever the reason the class took such an interest in Spencer and his rescue, University Historian Kevin Leonard theorized about the man’s enduring appeal. 

“Not only is this a memorial to Edward Spencer,” he said, “but it’s an admonition to later generations of Northwestern students to take on the attitude of ‘do your best.’” 

A newspaper clipping from University Archives. Newspapers of the time seized upon the story and popularized Spencer’s heroism.

The plaque had quite a journey on campus. In 1932, it was moved from Lunt to the lobby of the original Patten Gymnasium and then rehung in 1940 after the building was knocked down and rebuilt. In 2019, Patten Gymnasium underwent another round of renovations, when the plaque went out of sight for five years. Now, finally, the memorial has found what seems to be its most sensible home: next to the shore of Lake Michigan, facing the waters where Spencer did his best.