Mariners' Church was built for those who work the water, then rolled here on rails. Mariners' Church was founded in 1842 under the will of Julia Anderson and her sister, who left their estate to serve the spiritual needs of Great Lakes sailors. This Gothic Revival limestone church was completed in 1849, originally a few blocks away; in 1955, to make room for the riverfront civic center, the entire three-thousand-ton building was rolled nearly nine hundred feet along steel rails to this site, blocking Woodward Avenue for weeks.
The church became famous through Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which describes the bell here tolling twenty-nine times for the twenty-nine men lost when that ore freighter sank in Lake Superior in November 1975. Each year the church still rings its bell for the lost. Picture the weathered stone tower inching down the avenue on rails, a whole sanctuary on the move.