Shipwreck Found After 112 years in Lake Michigan

MILWAUKEE (June 25) -- With divers down more than 300 feet in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, the boat crew's hearts sank when a red lift bag came shooting up the mooring line with a note attached.

The last time that happened, a diver was dead underwater, said Brendon Baillod, who was leading the expedition earlier this month to find a lost shipwreck.

This note was different.

"All divers OK. Back in 80 minutes. Huge wooden freighter on bottom," it read.

And so a group of divers and maritime historians discovered a wooden steamship that had rested upright at the bottom of Lake Michigan for 112 years, its deckhouses gone and smokestack tipped over but its cargo of corn still in the hold.

"We were all ecstatic," Baillod told AOL News. "Mostly, we were happy the divers were OK. This was such a treacherous dive even for experienced technical divers. But then the happiness became -- we realized we had found the resting place for the Doty."

The 291-foot-long L.R. Doty mysteriously sank during a fall storm in 1898. At the time, an era when the Great Lakes were truly a freshwater freeway, it was a masterpiece of shipbuilding technology -- a huge wooden schooner with a hull reinforced with steel, said Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.

"And so it becomes the Titanic syndrome -- when you're driving the best, newest ship, you think it's not going to be sunk. You're willing to go out in anything. I'm sure the captain did not think he was going to go down."

But the Doty was towing a schooner, the Olive Jeanette, and the tow line apparently snapped during the fierce storm -- snow, sleet and 70 mph winds that whipped up 30-foot waves, Baillod said. The Doty's captain probably swung his ship around in a large arc to search for the schooner. No one saw the ship go down.

Based on clues from the site, Baillod believes the Doty's rudder chain may have snapped, and the ship's wooden hatch covers either collapsed inward or were torn off in the storm when water rushed over the deck.

All 17 crew members were lost, as were the ship's two cats, Baillod said. The schooner was rescued days later, adrift off Chicago, its crew battered but still alive.

"Finding this, it's amazing for us," Baillod said. "A lot of people worked for many years to find this wreck. This shipwreck was something of a legend -- everyone in the community knew about it, but no one thought it would be found."

The expedition to find the lost shipwreck dates to 1991, when a fishing boat reported snagging lines on an object in that spot. A dive shop owner and local diving legend, Jerry Guyer, went out to investigate, but the technology did not exist to dive so deep.

"And so he kind of preserved the knowledge of this snag and told us about it many years later," Baillod explained. "It was through him that the wreck came to light. If it had not been for him, I doubt the Doty ever would have been found."

Baillod, who wrote an encyclopedia of every ship ever lost in Wisconsin waters, "Fathoms Deep But Not Forgotten: Wisconsin's Lost Ships," said the artifacts aboard the Doty will not be retrieved -- like all old shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters, it is protected by the state. The remains of the crew probably have been preserved and most likely will be found in the boiler room, he said. Divers will treat the ship as a grave site.

Baillod may try to place the ship on state and national historical registers, but the Doty will remain at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

"We've learned our lesson about raising these ships," he said. "There's not enough money to preserve these artifacts. And so if you stick it in a museum in a dark corner, it looks like a pile of dried wood. And people aren't interested. It needs to stay exactly where it is."