Shipwreck experts revealed on Sunday that they have located the remains of the steamer that sank while in Lake Michigan more than 150 years ago.
Illinois shipwreck hunter Paul Ehorn, 80, completed a 60-year mission when his team with Shipwreck World discovered the sunken ship confirmed to be the Lac la Belle, which disappeared into Lake Michigan on Oct. 13, 1872.
Ehorn, who dreamed of finding the ship when he was 20, said his team had initially found the wreckage in October 2022 about 20 miles offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The team, however, waited on announcing their discovery until they could make a three-dimensional video model of the ship, with the team able to complete the mission after a visit to the wreck site last summer.
While the ship’s exterior is covered in quagga mussels and the upper cabins are gone, Ehorn said the hull looks intact and the oak interiors remain in good shape.
Ehorn declined to discuss all the clues that led to the discovery of the ship, but he revealed that a big hint came in 2022 when he spoke to fellow wreck hunter and author Ross Richardson.
After getting the clue, Ehorn and his team appeared along the Wisconsin shoreline and were able to find the ship after just two hours of sonar searching.
“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 told the Associated Press.
Richardson said he learned of an item found in a “certain location” by a commercial fisherman, with the expert describing the item as something specifically found on steam ships from the 1800s.
Like Ehron, Richardson declined to share more details about the find.
The Lac La Belle was a high-end steam ship built in 1864, in Cleveland, Ohio, with the massive ship stretching 217 feet, according to Shipwreck World.
The steamer ran between Cleveland and Lake Superior, but it sank in the St. Clair River in 1866 following a crash.
The ship was raised three years later and reconditioned, with the vessel sailing for Grand Haven, Michigan, on the night of a powerful gale.
About two hours into the trip, the ship — which was transporting 53 passengers and a cargo of barley, pork, flour and whiskey — ran a leak.
The captain attempted to turn the Lac La Belle back to Milwaukee, but huge waves pummeled the boat, extinguishing its boilers.
At around 5 a.m. the following day, the captain ordered the lifeboats lowered as the ship went down stern first, with one of the lifeboats capsizing in and killing eight people while on the way to shore.
America’s Great Lakes are home to about 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks, the vast majority of which remain undiscovered, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library.
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