On a warm summer afternoon in 1927 off South Haven, Michigan, an old barge began taking on water. Helpless to staunch the flow and realizing the vessel would sink, the crew escaped to the accompanying tug and watched as the ship slipped beneath the surface of Lake Michigan. Its loss unlamented, its career unheralded, it slumbered on the sandy bottom in the same obscurity that had shrouded its earlier days as a steam freighter sailing the Great Lakes. However, the vessel's anonymity ended in 2006 when Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates located the sunken wreck of the Hennepin. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Buckets and Belts: Evolution of the Great Lakes Self-Unloader traces more than a century of innovative technological advancements in the transportation of bulk cargos beginning with the Hennepin's conversion to a self-unloader in 1902 to today's mammoth thousand-foot lakers.

Containing the most comprehensive collection of self-unloader photographs ever published plus dozens of underwater images, this book also explores the lives of the people who designed these vessels, the crewman who sailed them and those self-unloaders that tragically went to the bottom of the lakes, some taking entire crews with them.