Shipwrecks are moving in our midst

By Jane Greiner
Sun contributor
Who can resist the romance and mystery of a shipwreck? All you have to do is go to Empire beach and you can see one for yourself.
This wreck lies half uncovered at the north end of Empire beach. It appears to be a section from the bottom of a wooden ship, which means it likely sailed in the 1800s.
There is one long heavy beam (perhaps the keelson), a number of curved ribs at right angles to it, and underneath but partly visible some long flat slabs which were probably the outer hull. The blunt, iron spike-like things sticking out of the wrecks are called connectors. In building these boats the connectors were driven into drilled holes with sledge hammers, according to Steve Harold, Director of the Manistee County Historical Museum.

Harold is the author of “Shipwrecks of the Sleeping Bear,” a book unfortunately now out of print. Once those connectors are driven in, Harold said, they are impossible to remove without totally tearing out the wood around them. You can see them clearly protruding out of the wreck in Empire.
Harold recently examined this wreck in Empire to see what he could learn about it. But it is impossible to positively identify any of these wrecks in the condition they are in, he says. You have to go somewhat on location, but he pointed out that this wreck “has moved a mile” since he first studied it 25 years ago.
Other shipwrecks have been known to move a lot faster. A wreck up in Leland moved a mile in only two years. “So how far could it have moved in 50 or 100 years?” he wondered, by way of illustrating that location alone is not enough for identification.
Harold listed six boats lost close to Sleeping Bear Point, The General Taylor, the Badger State, the St. Nicholas, the Kate Bully, the James McBride and the Gold Hunter.
He believes the ship on Empire beach was a “centerboard vessel of canal schooner dimensions.” Although that describes about half the ships lost on the Great Lakes, Harold said, it at least cuts in half the number of possible ships this could be.
Canal schooners were an innovation in which boats were designed to be pulled down a canal like Welland Canal (between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario) and then once into the Great Lakes could raise a mast, lower a centerboard and sail.
Harold cannot say for certain that the Empire wreck had a mast. But he thinks “it is possible” that it is either the James McBride or the Jennie and Annie, which match its dimensions, or the Gold Hunter, a ship which was lost only four months after she was launched and about which few details are known.
The James McBride sank near Sleeping Bear Point in 1857. Her story is interesting. She was a wood two-masted Brig (a ship with square rigged sails) 125 feet x 25 feet x 10 feet and weighing 272 tons. She was bound from the Manitou Islands to Chicago with a cargo of wood when she was forced ashore and wrecked. Fortunately, no lives were lost. She had been the first vessel to carry cargo directly from the West Indies to Chicago in 1848.
The Jennie and Annie was a wooden schooner (a ship with at least two masts and the taller main mast to the rear) built in 1863 in Buffalo. According to Harold’s book, “Her deep hold of 12 feet allowed her to carry large cargos of grain from Chicago to Buffalo.” She was lost in 1872 just north of Empire after being driven aground in a gale. Six or seven people were believed lost out of 10 on board.
A Second Shipwreck
For those willing to hike a bit, a piece of an old ship is visible on the sands around Sleeping Bear Point. It is approximately two miles south of the Life Saving Station and can be reached in an hour’s walk along the shore. A piece of the ship about 60 feet long lies at the water’s edge.
Although this shipwreck could be any of the six ships Harold mentioed, it is identified (perhaps optimistically) in some websites as the General Taylor. She was a wooden ship, propeller driven (steam power, not sail power), built in 1848 in Buffalo, and was 173 feet long. The General Taylor was lost in 1862, “driven aground by storm on Sleeping Bear Point with no lives lost.”
Another piece of the same ship (or of another one) is reported to lie just offshore in about 10 feet of water, according to an Internet posting by a kayaker.
Of course the wrecks in Empire and on Sleeping Bear Point could be two pieces of the same ship, Steve Harold points out.
Bill Herd, a National Park interpreter at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, says that both shipwrecks are located in the Manitou Passage State Underwater Preserve, which encompasses the Manitou Islands and stretches along the Lake Michigan shore from near Leland to Point Betsie. The Preserve safeguards the ships and other antiquities from salvage and souvenir hunters.
You can go see the wrecks, even touch them and take pictures, as long as you do not disturb them. That way the wrecks will be there (unless the Lake takes them away) so that people for years to come can marvel at their endurance and think about the days when these wooden ships were imperative to everyday life in this area.