There is something wonderfully simple about a picnic.
A blanket spread under the trees. The sound of laughter drifting through the air. Music, games, sunshine, and the rare chance to step away from work and responsibility for a few precious hours.
Each June, International Picnic Day celebrates those moments of togetherness and relaxation. For the thousands of Western Electric employees who boarded excursion ships on July 24, 1915, the annual employee picnic represented exactly that: a joyful escape from everyday life.
For many, it was the event of the summer.
The destination was Washington Park in Michigan City, Indiana, a bustling lakeside resort area along the southern tip of Lake Michigan that offered attractions for every age and interest. The park featured picnic grounds, a roller coaster, electric merry-go-round, dancing pavilion, baseball park, bathing beach with bath houses, bowling alleys, amusement rides, a bandstand, wooded walking paths, and even a photo studio.
It was designed for leisure, and for hardworking Chicago families in the early 1900s, leisure was not something that came often.
Most Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric company) employees worked six days a week. Time away from the factory floor was limited, and a full day devoted entirely to fun was a luxury many rarely experienced. The annual employee outing became a treasured tradition, a chance to relax with coworkers, neighbors, and family members outside the routines of daily life.
Attendance grew rapidly. Early picnics drew roughly 3,500 attendees, but by 1913, more than 6,000 people were participating. The event had become so popular that additional excursion ships were needed to handle the growing crowds.
One of those ships, added to increase capacity for the 1914 outing, was the SS Eastland.
The passengers boarding that July morning reflected the optimism of the era.
Many were young and single, excited for a day of dancing, socializing, and perhaps even romance. Newspaper accounts and family recollections describe young women wearing wide-brimmed hats, long dresses, stockings, corsets, and carefully polished boots despite the summer heat. Young men arrived in pressed suits and ties, dressed in what was often called their “Sunday best.”
The atmosphere was festive long before the ships left the dock.
One newspaper description of the picnic captured the spirit of the day perfectly:
“The women furnish the beauty; the men bring their appetites.”
Families packed lunches. Friends made plans to meet at the beach or dancing pavilion. Couples anticipated quiet walks through the wooded areas of the park. Baseball games, music performances, and amusement rides awaited them just across the lake.
“Summer wouldn’t be summer without the picnic” was a common sentiment among workers.
Even attending the outing required sacrifice. In 1915, an adult excursion ticket cost $1, or 75 cents if purchased in advance. While those prices may seem small today, they represented a meaningful expense for working class families. Hawthorne Works supervisor Nicholas Suerth earned approximately $17 a week working full time.
Yet more than 7,000 tickets were sold for the 1915 event, more than ever before. That number speaks to how much the picnic mattered.
For immigrants and first-generation Americans building lives in Chicago, the outing was about more than recreation. It was about belonging. It was about community. It was about creating memories during an era when daily life was often physically demanding and financially uncertain.
At approximately 6:30 a.m. on July 24, 1915, passengers began boarding the Eastland at the Clark Street dock in downtown Chicago in preparation for the 7:30 departure.
Boarding moved quickly, reportedly at a rate of nearly 50 passengers per minute. Soon, the ship’s capacity of roughly 2,500 passengers had been reached.
Musicians played ragtime music while passengers danced aboard the docked ship. Laughter echoed through the crowded decks. The picnic had already begun.
Moments later, the music stopped forever. The Eastland rolled onto its side while still tied to the dock, trapping hundreds below deck and claiming 844 lives.
The Eastland Disaster is often remembered for its staggering loss of life, but International Picnic Day reminds us to pause and consider what people were truly anticipating that morning.
Not disaster. Not history.
A picnic.
A baseball game. A dance. A walk by the lake. A rare day off. A chance to spend time with people they loved.
That humanity matters.
More than a century later, the Eastland Disaster Historical Society continues working to preserve those personal stories through photographs, records, family histories, and the People Database. Behind every ticket purchased for the picnic was a person with plans, relationships, and hopes for the future.
The question naturally lingered in the years that followed: Would there ever be another Hawthorne Works picnic? Surprisingly, the answer was yes.
While the shadow of the Eastland Disaster never disappeared, Western Electric eventually resumed employee outings in later years - with attendance once again reaching into the thousands - though with understandable changes in tone, transportation planning, and public perception. For many workers and families, the picnic tradition represented something larger than recreation. It was about community, normalcy, and reclaiming moments of joy after profound loss. Even so, for countless Chicago families, the word “picnic” would forever carry memories of the morning they gathered at the river expecting laughter and sunshine, only to have history intervene.
On International Picnic Day, we remember not only the tragedy, but also the joy, anticipation, and togetherness that brought thousands of people to the river that summer morning in the first place.
Because before it became one of Chicago’s darkest days, it was meant to be one of its happiest.