Rand McNally to the Chicago River: Agnes Lee's Eastland Story
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Rand McNally to the Chicago River: Agnes Lee's Eastland Story
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The Eastland disaster didn't vanish into the Chicago River — it scattered into poems, magazines, archives, and family research, waiting for someone to go looking.
In this episode, I push back on the idea that “history forgot” the Eastland disaster. History didn't forget. The records are there in abundance. What’s missing is the willingness to look past the easy summary and find them.
We return to Agnes Lee, a major voice in Chicago's literary scene, with a newly uncovered Eastland poem and a deep dive into her life and work. Then the trail takes an unexpected turn — straight to The Prison Mirror, a prisoner-run newspaper out of Stillwater, Minnesota. It's not a detour. It's a reminder that the most important sources often live outside the places we assume to search.
From there, I introduce Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine, and explain how her "open door" editorial policy preserved an entire community of writers responding to tragedy — Agnes Lee and Carl Sandburg among them.
You'll hear two of Lee's Eastland poems, "The Divers" and "Eastland Waters" — works that belong in any serious conversation about the 1915 disaster, Chicago history, public memory, and the ethics of retelling.
If you enjoy learning about overlooked voices of the Eastland disaster, subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review so more listeners can find Flower in the River.
Resources:
- Lee, Agnes. “Eastland Waters.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (February 1916)
- Lee, Agnes. “The Divers.” The Bookman 42 (September 1915–February 1916)
- The Editors, “Harriet Monroe & the Open Door,” Poetry Foundation, n.d., accessed June 24, 2026.
- Rand, Martha Agnes, and Agnes Lee. "The Knife and the Leaf." The Prison Mirror [Stillwater, MN], vol. 3, no. 5, 12 Sept. 1889, p. 1.
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