An intrepid team of marine archaeologists has discovered the wreckage of a long-sought-after schooner — more than a century after it sunk beneath Lake Michigan.
The Margaret A. Muir was found 50 feet below the surface several miles off the coast of Algoma, Wisconsin in May, the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association announced this month.
“I knew she was going to be in about 50 feet of water, I knew that her sides had opened up. I know she was laying flat, and I knew she’d be harder to find,” Brendon Baillod, a crew member of the search, told Fox 6 Milwaukee.
Baillod and his team of experts were right — the 130-foot, three-masted schooner’s deck had collapsed and its sides had fallen outward, images show.
All the deck gear — including two giant anchors, hand pumps and bow windlass — remain on the historic deck, as well as the personal items sailors lost in the wreck.
Margaret A. Muir was en route from Bay City, Michigan, to South Chicago, Illinois, with a cargo of bulk salt on Sept. 30, 1893 when tragedy struck.
The vessel, built in 1872, had almost reached Ahnapee, which is now known as Algoma, when a strong storm rolled in.
Captain David Clow and his six-member crew abandoned the schooner just in time — the Margaret A. Muir lurched forward and sank to the bottom of the lake, taking Clow’s loyal pooch down with it.
“I would rather lose any sum of money than to have the brute perish as he did,” the heartbroken captain later said, according to the WUAA.
The crew also suffered an arduous trip to shore in their lifeboat. They had to continuously bail out the water-logged raft across their several-mile trip.
“The Margaret A. Muir was lost to history” in the last 130 years since, despite its relatively close proximity to shore, according to the experts.
“It had lay undetected for over a century, despite hundreds of fishing boats passing over each season.”
Even the WUAA crew nearly missed the destroyed vessel — the team was completing their last pass as part of their search for the schooner for the day and were retrieving their sonar equipment when they ran over the wreck.
Now the team is working with the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Maritime Archeology Program to nominate the site to the National Register of Historic Places.
If accepted, it will join the schooner Trinidad, which the team located in deep water off Algoma in June of 2023.