This Shipwreck’s Location Was a Mystery for 129 Years. Then, Two Men Found It Just Minutes Into a Three-Day Search

On the afternoon of June 5, 1895, the John Evenson was preparing to tow a much larger ship, the I.W. Stephenson, into the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal in Door County, Wisconsin. As the wooden steam tugboat’s crew tried to grab a line from the I.W. Stephenson, the smaller vessel sailed in front of the bigger one—and the two ships collided.

The John Evenson sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan in just three minutes. Four crew members were flung into the water and later rescued. But the tugboat’s engineer, Martin Boswell, had been working below deck during the collision. He never made it to safety.

The vessel’s final resting place has been a mystery for 129 years—until now.

A few weeks ago, two maritime historians found the wreck of the John Evenson five miles off the coast of Algoma, Wisconsin. The ship is resting on the lake bed roughly 42 feet below the surface.

In 1895, the wreck had been “widely reported” in marine newspapers, according to a statement from the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association. But accounts of where the 54-foot-long ship went down varied widely: Some publications reported that the vessel sank in 50 feet of water, while others claimed it had been 300 feet.

Divers have been trying to find the John Evenson since the 1980s, with one local dive club even offering a $500 cash reward to anyone who succeeded. But the wreck remained hidden.

Recently, maritime historians Brendon Baillod and Bob Jaeck decided to take up the search once again. They started by reading everything they could find about the wreck, including the report written after the fact by John Laurie, the ship’s captain. When they mapped all the locations mentioned in the archival documents, they noticed that several were clustered in the same small area.

Armed with this information, they set out to find the John Evenson. On the morning of September 13, the duo embarked on a three-day search expedition. Lake Michigan’s waves were rough that day, and the water was 15 feet deeper than they had expected, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Caitlin Looby.

They decided to deploy their side-scan sonar equipment anyway. Just a few minutes later, as they were tuning the sonar signals, the shape of a huge boiler appeared on the display screen. The two men were shocked.

Live Reveal: The Discovery of the Steam Tug John Evenson

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“We just couldn’t believe it,” Jaeck recalled in a video announcing the discovery. “We actually hadn’t even started our search. We were just getting the equipment up and going.”

They dropped a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) into the water to confirm that the wreck was the John Evenson. The ROV showed the vessel’s boiler, as well as its steam engine, giant propeller and hull-bed.

“It was almost like the wreck wanted to be found,” Baillod tells the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Baillod and Jaeck contacted Tamara Thomsen, the state underwater archaeologist for Wisconsin, to let her know what they’d discovered. The next day, Thomsen and diver Zach Whitrock arrived at the site to document the John Evenson.

They snapped more than 2,000 high-resolution underwater photos, which allowed them to create a 3D photogrammetry model of the wreck. Moving forward, the team hopes to nominate the wreck for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places; they also want to make it available to recreational divers.

For Baillod and Jaeck, the past few years have been a busy—and fruitful—time for shipwreck hunting. Last year, they found the schooner Trinidad in Lake Michigan roughly ten miles off the coast of Algoma. Earlier this summer, they found the Margaret A. Muir, a 130-foot schooner that sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan during a storm in 1893.

Sarah Kuta | READ MORE

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.