Madison, Wisconsin.. Researchers have discovered the wreck of a luxury steamship that sank in a storm on Lake Michigan in the late 1800s, completing a mission that began nearly 60 years ago.
A team led by Paul Ehorn, an Illinois shipwreck hunter, found Lake La Belle about 20 miles (32 kilometers) offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, in October 2022, the group Shipwreck World, which works to locate shipwrecks around the world, announced Friday.
Ehorn told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Sunday that the announcement was delayed because his team wanted to include a 3D video model of the ship with it, but bad weather and other commitments prevented his dive team from returning to the wreck until last summer.
Ehorn, 80, has been searching for shipwrecks since he was 15 years old. He said he had been trying to locate Lac La Belle since 1965. He used a lead from fellow wreck hunter and author Ross Richardson in 2022 to narrow his search grid and found the ship using side-scan sonar after just two hours on the lake.
“It’s kind of a game, like solving a puzzle. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of pieces to put the puzzle together, but this one worked and we found it right away,” he said. The discovery left him “extremely elated”.
Ehorn declined to discuss the evidence that led to the discovery. Richardson said in a brief phone interview Sunday that he learned that a commercial fisherman in “a certain location” had snatched up what Richardson described as a 19th-century steamship item. He declined to provide further details about how competitive shipwreck hunting has become, and said the information could alert researchers to another way to conduct research.
According to an account on the Shipwreck World website, Lac La Belle was built in 1864, in Cleveland, Ohio. The 217-foot (66 m) 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 refitted.
The ship left Milwaukee for Grand Haven, Michigan, in a storm on the night of October 13, 1872, carrying 53 passengers and crew and a cargo of barley, pork, flour, and whiskey. About two hours into the journey, the ship began taking on water uncontrollably. The captain turned Lac La Belle back toward Milwaukee but heavy waves crashed over her and put out her boilers. The storm pushed the ship south. At about five o’clock in the morning, the captain ordered the lifeboats to be lowered and the ship went down stern first.
One of the lifeboats capsized on its way to shore, killing eight people. Other lifeboats made landfall along the Wisconsin coast between Racine and Kenosha.
The exterior of the wreck is covered in mussels, and the overhead cabins are gone, but the hull appears intact and the oak interiors are still in good condition, Ehorn said.
The Great Lakes are home to 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, according to the Wisconsin Aquatic Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shipwreck fishermen have been searching the lakes more urgently in recent years because of concerns that invasive mussels are slowly destroying shipwrecks.
La Belle Lake is the 15th wreck discovered by Ehorn. “It was another check mark,” he said. “And now we move on to the next stage. It’s getting harder and harder. The easiest has been found.”
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