Searchers find wreck of steamer lost in Lake Michigan

• AP, MADISON, Wisconsin

Searchers have discovered the wreck of a luxury steamer that sank in a Lake Michigan gale in the late 19th century, completing a quest that began almost 60 years ago.

Shipwreck World, a group that seeks shipwrecks around the globe, on Friday announced that a team led by Illinois shipwreck hunter Paul Ehorn found the Lac La Belle about 32km offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, in October 2022.

Ehorn on Sunday said that the announcement was delayed because his team wanted to include a three-dimensional video model of the ship with it, but poor weather and other commitments kept his dive team from going back down to the wreck until last summer.

Ehorn, 80, has been searching for shipwrecks since he was 15 years old. He said that he has been trying to pinpoint the Lac La Belle’s location since 1965.

He used a clue from fellow wreck hunter and author Ross Richardson in 2022 to narrow down his search grid and found the ship using side-scan sonar after just two hours on the lake, he said.

“It’s kind of a game, like solve the puzzle. Sometimes you don’t have many pieces to put the puzzle together, but this one worked out and we found it right away,” he said.

Ehorn declined to discuss the clue that led to the discovery.

Richardson said that he learned that a commercial fisherman at a “certain location” had snagged what Richardson called an item specific to steam ships from the 1800s.

He declined to elaborate further how competitive shipwreck hunting has become and said the information could alert searchers to another way to conduct research.

According to an account on Shipwreck World, the Lac La Belle was built in 1864, in Cleveland, Ohio. The 66m steamer ran between Cleveland and Lake Superior but sank in the St Clair River in 1866 after a collision. The ship was raised in 1869, and reconditioned.

The ship left Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for Grand Haven, Michigan, in a gale on the night of Oct. 13, 1872, with 53 passengers and crew and a cargo of barley, pork, flour and whiskey. About two hours into the trip, the ship began to take on water uncontrollably.

The captain turned the Lac La Belle back toward Milwaukee, but huge waves came crashing over it, extinguishing its boilers. The storm drove the ship south. At about 5am, the captain ordered lifeboats lowered and the ship went down stern-first.

One of the lifeboats capsized on the way to shore, killing eight people. The other lifeboats made landfall along the Wisconsin coast between Racine and Kenosha.

The wreck’s exterior is covered with quagga mussels and the upper cabins are gone, but the hull looks intact and the oak interiors are still in good shape, Ehorn said.

The Great Lakes are home to anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library.

Shipwreck hunters have been searching the lakes with more urgency in the past few years out of concerns that invasive quagga mussels are slowly destroying wrecks.

The Lac La Belle is the 15th shipwreck Ehorn has located.

“It was one more to put a check mark by,” he said. “Now it’s on to the next one. It’s getting harder and harder. The easier ones have been found.”