More than 130 years after a ship was lost at sea, its wreck was found at the bottom of Lake Michigan near Wisconsin by accident.
Matt Olson, owner of Door County Adventure Rafting, was scouting for sites to take his customers near Rowleys Bay, Wisconsin, when he spotted a submerged shipwreck, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Maritime archaeologists then conducted follow-up diving missions and were able to identify the 137-foot-long vessel as the long-lost Frank D. Barker, which was built in 1867 and sunk in 1887.
"I was looking on satellite images of the waters around the peninsula around here, and I happened to come across this sort of anomaly in the water. This object that maybe could be a shipwreck, maybe it's not," Olson told WLUK.
"When we pulled the boat over it, we could faintly see it from the surface and that's why I was surprised no one had come across it yet.”
The ship was heading for Escanaba, Michigan, to collect a load of iron ore when it ran into inclement weather, the historical society said in a release last month.
The captain and crew veered off course and were stranded on Spider Island, not far from Rowleys Bay, until conditions improved. Several attempts to recover the boat in the days and months that followed were unsuccessful, leaving the vessel lost until now.
“Whenever we receive this type of call, it’s hard to know exactly what we will find. We were excited to identify the wreck as the Frank D. Barker, whose exact location has been lost for over a century,” Tamara Thomsen, Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist, said in a statement.
“We are grateful for Matt Olson’s keen sense of observation and quick reporting of the discovery so we can document this chapter of Wisconsin’s storied maritime history.”
The Frank D. Barker was constructed of wood and was built by Simon G. Johnson in Clayton, New York. It was once valued around $8,000 — which would amount to over $250,000 today, the historical society said.
This is hardly Olson’s first rodeo.
Last year, he reported another shipwreck, which turned out to be the Grey Eagle, a schooner constructed in 1857 that sank in 1869. The year before that, he came across the Sunshine, a scow schooner that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023, according to the historical society.
“It’s an incredible feeling to come across a shipwreck of this size and in such great condition, especially knowing how long it went undetected. I am honored to play a role in bringing this history to light so folks can better understand Wisconsin’s maritime history,” he told the historical society in a statement.
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