Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Visiting Every Grave -  George Hilton’s  Eastland Legacy

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 134

Share episode

Send us a text

A century after his birth, George W. Hilton is still guiding our footsteps. This episode honors the transportation historian whose book Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic became the cornerstone of Eastland disaster research. After discovering my own family connection to the Eastland Disaster, Hilton’s work became my north star.

What begins with grief — and a surprise manuscript from a relative — unfolds into a story about how scholarship, storytelling, and stubborn love for truth can rescue memory from the margins.

I share the early frustration of facing Hilton’s dense footnotes while craving a human arc, and how another Eastland researcher’s long-lost web essays built a bridge into the story.

Along the way, we unpack Hilton’s core thesis: how post-Titanic safety regulations, lifeboat mandates, and a top-heavy design converged with ballast flaws to create catastrophic instability. We revisit the numbers debate — death certificates, Coast Guard counts, Tribune tallies — and highlight the rare intellectual humility Hilton showed by documenting uncertainty rather than forcing false precision. It’s a masterclass in research methods, regulatory history, and ethical remembrance.

We also sketch Hilton’s life: Chicago-born, Dartmouth- and University of Chicago-trained, UCLA professor, prolific author on railroads, cable cars, and night boats. Hilton literally went the extra mile, visiting the graves of Eastland victims to verify names and pay respect. He never tried to control the narrative, but instead invited others to complete the record and join the research.

That spirit propels our push to make his work more accessible through digital and audio editions — because discoverability is the lifeline of public history and genealogy.

Resources:

Natalie. Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 134 of Flower in the River. I hope you're doing well. So in the last episode, we discussed George Hilton's book Eastland, Legacy of the Titanic, and we're not done yet. I don't think we'll ever actually be done with this book, just to let you know. And I was thinking about George this week, and as often as I rely on his work, and I really have relied on his work more and more, I don't think I've ever properly introduced him. And there's another reason I want to mention George in this podcast episode. This year, on January 18th, 2025, that was George Hilton's 100th birthday. I looked around to see if there was any type of public acknowledgement, and there wasn't. Any of us who have done Eastland work owe him a lot, so I'm sorry that I missed his birthday as well. So happy belated one hundredth birthday to George Hilton, wherever you are. So let's talk about George Hilton's book about the Eastland. If you haven't read it or seen it yet, it is still the cornerstone of Eastland's scholarship. And yet, almost 30 years after its publication, it's only available in print. You can look at it in digital format on the Internet Archive, and I'm totally grateful for that. But there's no ebook, no audiobook, nothing to make this marvelous book more accessible to new generations. So here's what I did. I contacted Stanford University Press. They are the copyright holder, and I asked about the possibility of digital and audio editions. Are there any in the works? I would have expected some organization to have done this by now, but I don't think that's happened. I'll let you know what the outcome of that is. Here's some backstory. When I first met George Hilton's book in the late 1990s, let me tell you it was not love at first sight. I'll have to set the stage. I think you'll understand better where my head was and why it took a while to be able to absorb what this man had done. So a series of events led me into doing what I'm doing right now. Way back in 1996, my dad died. My mom was still alive, but I was devastated. In theory, we are supposed to outlive our parents. Of course, that doesn't always happen. But when that day comes, when that first parent exits from the stage of your life, the ground shifts. I felt as if my entire foundation had blown up. And fortunately, I have a strong community of friends up here that are a lot like family. I had no family nearby, at least that's what I thought. And my closest relative geographically was in Chicago. And that was my mom's older half-sister. At that point, she was in her eighties. I didn't really know her. I'd only met her a few times. And my mom herself had only met her sister and her older brother just a handful of times in her life. Here's why that happened. Their mother, my grandmother, left her older children in Chicago to live with her own mother, my great-grandmother. This was my grandmother's second marriage, and her first husband died rather mysteriously. That's another story. My grandmother, in the meantime, relocated hundreds of miles away to Johnstown, Pennsylvania to marry my grandfather, fortunately for me. And so my grandparents had my mom in 1931, and just three years later, my grandmother, still in her early 40s, had a heart attack and died. And that tragedy pretty much severed the connection to mom's Chicago family. Although her older teenage siblings attended the funeral in Johnstown, my mom didn't remember it. She was a baby. And she was raised by her dad, his brother, and his brother's wife. And on the surface, it was a secure life. They were German immigrants from Poland who did well in business, opening restaurants and bars. But that connection to Chicago, it slowly evaporated. Travel back then wasn't what it is now. And since my mother grew up without a mother or her siblings, she often said that it all felt so unreal. The only thing she remembered from her first and only visit to Chicago when she was 13 years old was the buildings. Her older siblings seemed like strangers to her. And occasionally her siblings would write letters or send cards, but that side of the family was, as mom later described it, a black hole. When I asked her what it was like growing up without a mother, she'd shrug and say, you can't miss what you never had. But I'll tell you this, I never believed her. And here's the irony. Our mom was an extraordinarily fantastic mother herself. And I grew up very close to my dad's side of the family, so I didn't think much about mom's genealogical black hole. And I too didn't miss what I never had. At that point, I was only mildly interested in family history. And I was also super restless in my late teens and twenties. I bounced around from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Detroit, Michigan, to England, back to the States, back to Cleveland briefly, where most of my immediate family was living. I finally settled in Minneapolis, St. Paul for grad school. And that was where I did settle. This area felt so familiar, even though it was so different from the rust belt where I'd mostly grown up. Life was good. Until Dad's death stopped me in my tracks. About a year and a half after my dad's death, I got a surprise in the mail. A document from my mom's sister in Chicago. I had no contact with my Aunt Pearl, so to suddenly receive a 38-page typewritten manuscript from her was shocking, to say the least. She included a note explaining that this was my maternal grandmother's genealogical record, our family history. Pearl, then in her eighties, wrote that if she didn't write it all down, the history would be lost. She'd already shared it with other relatives who ignored it. And she sent it to me because I was her last resort. And she wrote, I heard you are a writer now. And then she added, Please do something with this. So there I was, feeling like I was already gutted. And now suddenly a branch of the family that had always been this massive black hole was overflowing with names and biographies. And a woman I barely knew was asking me to take it on. Honestly, at first I thought I'm not in a state to take on much of anything. However, that's when my training kicked in. By then I was an established journalist, freelance reporter, etc., for all sorts of newspapers and magazines. And this document, since it was about my family, of course I was interested in it. But there was no way to prepare for what I was about to encounter once I started delving deep into it. I understood the words, but emotionally I couldn't absorb it all. All of these names, these people were related to me somehow. And yet, for the most part, I'd never heard of any of them. And yet there was this one page, one story, just a few little paragraphs, but it leapt off that page. A story about my grandmother's younger sister, who had died at age 19. According to my Aunt Pearl, my great aunt Martha was killed along with more than 800 others in 1915 when a ship called the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River. No way. I had always been fascinated with Chicago from the time I was a child, and I prided myself on knowing Chicago's history. But now, here was this incredible story involving a family member that I never heard of. Actually, I never heard of the story or the family member at that point. Well, I'm a journalist, so I started researching. I found a couple of books at our local library that mentioned the Eastland, but they only gave high-level detail. So I turned to this thing called the Internet. It was very new in the late 90s, but it was growing quickly, and it was there that I got lucky. First of all, I found that somebody had written a book, a guy called George Hilton. So I ordered the book from Amazon, and I think I was expecting a storybook for adults. Something that could help me make sense of all of this. And instead, when I opened it and just saw all the detail and all the footnotes and all the information and all the numbers, I was suddenly back in graduate school, and I felt that I had ordered the equivalent of Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology or some other massive tome by Rudolph Boltman. I graduated from seminary, by the way. I could not take that in. The only thing that lit me up about that book was seeing that my great aunt's name was in the list of victims. I knew George Hilton was an excellent scholar. I knew he had done his homework, but I was not in a place where I could receive that information. Isn't that ironic? But I still looked at the book and tried to absorb it, tried to take it in, and I would compare it to the information that my aunt Pearl had shared with me. And even though this was frustrating and confusing, I hung in there with it. I felt someday it would all make sense. Someday took a long time to arrive, by the way. But not too long after that, a bridge miraculously appeared. There was a website that was created by a woman called Mary Bonneville. Let me spell the surname. It's B-O-N-E-V-E-L-L-E, and I hope I'm not mispronouncing it too badly. She was a gifted writer, historian, and storyteller. I later wrote to her and we corresponded for a while, and I learned that she had no connection to the Eastland disaster, but she was interested in ships and she liked to collect old postcards. And then she took it one step further and created all of this history about the Eastland. I have to say, as a family member and as somebody at that point that was new to all of this information, I will forever be grateful to her for her storytelling abilities. I mean, she took us from the beginning to the middle to the end. And she also had a number of detailed biographies on this website. I just was able to locate them on the Internet Archives Way Back Machine that seem to have gotten lost as well. So I'll share those in a later episode because this is yet another part of the historiography of the Eastland disaster that was in danger of getting lost. So we need to bring that back as well. So I printed out the pages from Mary's website about the history and sent them to my mother, and she had a similar reaction. She was actually blown away. For the first time in her life, she could understand this crucial piece of her own long-lost family history. And at that point, here's what I was doing. I was toggling back and forth between George Hilton's book and this website, and slowly but surely I was able to understand what happened. I'm not sure why Mary didn't continue with this project, but there are so many reasons that these things happen. However, she left a gift, and besides everything else she did, she told us where she got her information from. I took for granted that anyone working on a historical project would do this, but that has not always been the case, and that's been a huge challenge with researching the Eastland disaster. But now, these many years later, right after I published my book, late 2021, not too long after that, I began expanding my research and looking at other people besides my family members who were affected by the Eastland disaster. And when I saw how many biographies were missing, how much information wasn't there, I returned to George Hilton's book because I knew that I could trust his work and I knew that he did the best he could. It wasn't the only resource I turned to, obviously, but it has been a guiding light through all of this. And I consider it the cornerstone of everything I'm doing at this point. Just last week I profiled the biography of someone who was inadvertently left out of George Hilton's list of victims. But here's the thing. Hilton knew that his list was not complete, and he invited other family members, other researchers to contribute what they knew to his findings. Well, let's hear what George Hilton had to say. This audio is from a documentary that was done a year after George's book, Eastland Legacy of the Titanic, was published. It is available on the Internet Archive, and I will give you a link to it so you can hear it in its entirety. This is George Hilton.

George Hilton:

Almost all of whom were Catholic, so this just deluged the cemeteries of the archdiocese with funerals, uh more than they could plan for. There weren't enough coffins in the city to uh take care of all of this.

Narrator:

A week after the disaster, there were still unidentified and unclaimed bodies, and there would always be a dispute over the precise number of victims of the Eastland tragedy.

George Hilton:

The number of lives lost was indisputably over eight hundred and twelve. There are eight hundred and twelve death certificates on microfilms in the Mormon archive in Salt Lake City and elsewhere. The Coast Guard had to make a casualty report, and they said the number of kills was eight hundred and thirty-six, but they could not be identified. The tribute's final statement was eight hundred and forty-four bodies had been recovered. Six of those had not yet been identified, or were ultimately identified. Rather than trying to make my own estimate, I took the tribune last figure. It seemed to me authoritative, it seemed to me consistent with the rest of this, especially when they said that some had not been identified. Remember, you know, the Titanic is an ocean disaster. People took out passport. Even on the Titanic, you're not sure how many people were killed in the four. Anyone could kill a board. There was no record of who the people were. It's very difficult to make a specific thing. I'm quite sure that it wasn't eight hundred and twelve. I think that is the number processed through the central morgue that was set up. When they identify the body, it was taken, or at least the person who identified the body was taken to a room on the upper story, and the death certificate was made out. That I think was eight hundred and twelve.

Natalie. Zett:

So there you have George's own words, and I know some of the dialogue's hard to hear, but I'll have that transcribed. But as you can hear, he's speculating about the numbers, but he admits that it's too difficult to come up with a hard and fast number of the people who died on the Eastland. And as I was revisiting George Hilton's book, I thought, I really don't know you, so I wanted to pause here and introduce us to this enigmatic, brilliant man who accomplished so much in his lifetime. Dr. George W. Hilton was a distinguished economist and transportation historian who made significant contributions to the understanding of regulatory economies and transportation history in America. George Hilton was born in Chicago in 1925, and he was an only child as far as I can tell. His parents were Lucius Woodman Hilton and Lawrence Anderson. I often get to know somebody through their family tree, and George has a family tree on his father's side that goes way, way back. The family predated the Mayflower, as far as I can tell. Other family tidbits. George's paternal grandfather was a physician. And the family seemed very well established, perhaps they were even wealthy, and they were originally from various states on the East Coast. Not sure why they ended up in Chicago. George's dad was a hospital administrator, his mother was a stay-at-home mother, so that's George's family. Highlights of George's life. He graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1942. His childhood experiences with transportation systems in Chicago provided him with practical knowledge that he later transformed into scholarly expertise. Hilton had quite the academic journey beginning at Dartmouth College, that's in New Hampshire, where he excelled as a student and graduated sumacumalade via beta kappa with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1946. But that was just the beginning. He continued his education at Dartmouth, earning a master's degree in 1950. His academic pursuits then took him to the prestigious London School of Economics, where he studied from 1953 to 1955 before completing his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago in 1956. After brief teaching positions at the University of Maryland and Stanford University, Hilton joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA in 1962. He remained at UCLA for 30 years, teaching economics and transportation regulation till his retirement in 1992 when he became professor emeritus of economics. Although his basic concentration was on transportation economies, one of his most significant contributions to historical research was his comprehensive research on the Eastland disaster. Eastland, legacy of the Titanic, provided what many consider the definitive account of one of the worst maritime disasters in Great Lakes history. To say George Hilton was meticulous is an understatement. And he invited all of us to participate. He wanted our feedback. It was not a closed case for him, by the way. Some of the conclusions George Hilton reached after conducting his research. The disaster was largely caused by safety regulations implemented after the Titanic. That was his theory. Here are some of Hilton's findings. The ship had been rendered top heavy as a result of post-Titanic safety measures, particularly the introduction of more lifeboats as well as rafts. Also, the vessel had inherent design flaws and ballast system problems that contributed to its instability. The chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, according to Hilton, became a convenient scapegoat, blamed for mismanaging the ballast tanks, although evidence indicated broader systemic failures. The subsequent legal proceedings, which dragged on for 24 years, resulted in virtually no compensation for victims' families, according to Hilton. Hilton's research demonstrated how well-intentioned safety regulations could produce unintended and tragic consequences, a theme that would resonate throughout his career as a regulatory economist. Hilton was a staunch advocate for competitive market organization and a vocal critic of government regulation, particularly in the transportation sector. Hilton was also prolific, authoring fifteen books and countless articles throughout his career. He spanned transportation history, regulatory economics, and economic thought, establishing him as one of the foremost authorities in these fields. And here are a few of his major works. Cable Railways of Chicago, published in 1954, his first major work published by the Electric Railway Historical Society. Another work was The Maw and Paw, a history of the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad. That was published in 1963 and revised in 1999 and considered by Hilton himself to be his best work chronicling a 77-mile railroad he had long wanted to study. The Cable Car in America, published in 1997, was a comprehensive study of cable car systems in 29 American cities. And of course, there's the book about the Eastland disaster. And now I want to read some of the obituaries and tributes to George Hilton. George W. Hilton, 89, a retired UCLA professor, author, and transportation economist, known for his study of railroads and shipping, died August 4th of heart failure in Columbia, Maryland. In 1962, Hilton joined the faculty of UCLA, where he taught economics and transportation regulation until retiring in 1992. He was the author of 15 books. Quote, George was a great historian for lost causes and great failures, said Herbert H. Harwood Jr., a retired CSX Corporation executive and a nationally known railroad historian and author. That resulted in the definitive histories of the American narrow gauge railroads, the electric interturban railway industry, and cable powered street railways, and overnight steamships along the coasts and in the Great Lakes. In all of these he was obsessive about detail, but then could summarize everything into a big picture explained simply, directly, usually with a few memorable bon mats along the way, he said. He described the hilly, ever curving ma and pa for exactly. Example as the route of the screaming Flange's. One time we were talking about his legacy and George said he didn't want to be remembered as an economist, but rather as a transportation historian, said John Teichmuller, a longtime friend who lives in Elliott City, where he is the coordinator of the Rail Marine Information Group. He had many dimensions to him. George Woodman Hilton was born january eighteenth, nineteen twenty five in Chicago and raised on the city's south side. His father was a hospital administrator and his mother was a homemaker. During his childhood, he became transfixed by trains and ships. This is from the Baltimore Sun, August 12th, 2014. And I'm just going to share some quotes because much of this information is repetitive. James H. Breedy, the late Evening Sun editorial writer, wrote in a 1968 Books and Authors column that with the publication of Mr. Hilton's Ma and Pa book, he assured the railroad enduring national fame among rail fans. I'm going to insert a brief pause here to explain that the Ma and Paw Railroad is the nickname for the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, a short line that ran between Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania. It was famous for being small, scrappy, and beloved. Lots of curves, small towns, and kind of a mom and pop feel compared to the big railroads. We'll continue. The book had much merit as an economic history, said Robert J. Brugger, a Baltimore author and historian, who is an editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, which reprinted the book in the 1990s. Quote, it sold quite well, so the Ma and Pa after its death achieved success after all. Quote, George Hilton's book also was the likely single most important thing that got both the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society and the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Preservation Society started or formed in 1985, said Rudy Fisher, the archivist for the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad Historical Society. Another of Dr. Hilton's books was The Night Boat, which chronicled the era of overnight packet boats that once steamed on the nation's rivers and bays. The old bay lines city of Norfolk commenced its last voyage, April 13, 1962, sailing from Norfolk, Virginia, to Baltimore. The book he was most proud of was Eastland, Legacy of the Titanic, an examination of a 1915 disaster published in 1995, in which an excursion boat capsized while docked in the Chicago River, killing more than 800 people. William Hyder, a former Sunday Sun TV critic, reporter, and longtime friend, wrote in a biographical sketch. He was considered an expert on Major League Baseball. The Chicago White Sox was his favorite team and was the author of The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner. For years, his car's license plate was Socks 06. I want to close with something really special that I found. This is from the Daily Bruin, September second, twenty fourteen. The author is Julia Rabin. And I won't share the information I've already shared with you, but here's what's unique about this article. Hilton, a professor of economics and transportation regulation at UCLA for 30 years, died on August 4th of a heart ailment at an assisted living facility in Columbia, Maryland. He was 89. Hilton's friends and family knew him as a dedicated sports fan who was determined to pursue all subjects that interested him. He was very honest, a man of his word. Once when he was planning to write about the 1915 Eastland boating accident on the Chicago River that left eight hundred and forty one passengers dead, he went to everyone's grave to verify every detail. They didn't have the internet then, Stefan said. It was the only book written in that time about the disaster. And it was always a big achievement for him. His attention to the people he wrote about was mirrored by the care he gave to his friends. He also donated a significant portion of his money to charities because he thought it was his duty, Stefan said. He took good care of the people, associations, and memberships he loved. He would give most of his money to charities. He thought that if he didn't take care of them, they would disappear. And the fact that he went to every grave to investigate to take a look at each one of those people. Wow. I wonder if he went to my great aunt's grave. I bet he did. Well, George Hilton, when you left this world, the mold was indeed broken. Your book was not easy for me at first. I had to grow into it, and it took a long time to grow into it. But now it feels as if you're here, not just with me, but with all of us who care about this history. For me, though, it's my reality check, my lifeline and my guide. So how about you? Do you have a better feel for who George Hilton was and what he contributed to wow, so many areas, so many disciplines. But primarily I will always and forever be grateful to him for what he's done for the history of the people of the Eastland disaster. Take care of yourselves, okay? And take care of each other, and I'll talk to you next week. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinther.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money. And that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Natalie Zett

Host