The passenger steamer Lady Elgin collided with the schooner Augusta in Lake Michigan during a storm in September 1860. The damaged steamer sank near Winnetka, Illinois, with the loss of around 300 people. Many passengers belonged to Milwaukee's Irish-American community.

Henry Clay Work's song-poem Lost on the Lady Elgin carried the disaster into American popular memory. Its ballad form personalised mass death and demonstrated how printed lyrics could rapidly commemorate tragedy across dispersed immigrant communities.