ALGOMA - Less than a year after finding a long-lost shipwreck considered one of the most significant in Lake Michigan, a team from the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association has located another historic lost wreck not far away.
And its finders say this newly discovered, 131-year-old wreck could be more culturally significant to Wisconsin than the previous one because of its closer ties to the state, especially communities on the Lake Michigan shore and including Door County.
The ship was the Margaret A. Muir, a 130-foot-long, three-masted schooner built in Manitowoc that carried mainly grain and other cargoes throughout the Great Lakes until it sank in Lake Michigan a few miles off the Algoma shore in 1893.
Maritime historians Brendon Baillod, Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association president, vice president Kevin Cullen and director Robert Jaeck deliberately searched for the Muir for a couple years before locating it with high-resolution side-scanning sonar May 12. The association now will work with the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Maritime Archeology Program to nominate the site for the National Register of Historic Places.
The finding of the Muir comes on the heels of Baillod and Jaeck leading the discovery of the Trinidad, a 140-foot cargo schooner that sank with a load of coal in 270 feet of Lake Michigan water about 9½ miles off Algoma in May of 1881. The team found the Trinidad's remains in July 2023, also the result of a deliberate search for it, and it recently was named to the Wisconsin and National Registers of Historic Places.
Although the methods used to locate the Trinidad and the Muir are similar, there were some differences. And while the Trinidad's hull and most of its gear are intact, even the rigging and personal items and artifacts inside the deck house, which Baillod said makes the wreck so important, the Muir's hull is broken up.
But Baillod said the Muir is important in different ways in its own right, especially locally because of its Wisconsin ties.
"Architecturally, it's as important as the Trinidad. Culturally, I'd say it's a little more important, because of its importance to Wisconsin," he said in an interview with the Advocate. "I think there's a lot more of a Wisconsin story to tell with the Muir. I think a lot of local people will find it more interesting."
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Muir linked to Wisconsin from start to finish
The ties between Wisconsin and the Margaret A. Muir began at the vessel's birth and were cemented by her sinking.
According to an article by Baillod on the the Shipwreck World website as well as a ship history on the Wisconsin Shipwrecks site, the Muir was built in 1872 by the Hanson & Scove shipyard in Manitowoc for Capt. David Muir. It subsequently was home ported in Chicago, carrying primarily grain but also other goods in its 21-year career spanning all five of the Great Lakes.
The Muir sustained occasional damages over its 21 years of duty, with incidents listed on Wisconsin Shipwrecks caused by weather and towing issues that appear typical for wooden Great Lakes cargo ships of the day.
One exception happened Sept. 21, 1883, when the Muir encountered ship traffic while being towed in the Chicago River with a load of grain and collided with the steam barge Emma E. Thompson, resulting in the Muir losing its jibboom and headgear and having to remain in port for repairs. Also while in Chicago on this voyage, a number of nonunion crew members were forced off the ship by local union partisans.
In another unusual incident, on Oct. 10, 1890, the steamer Northern Light departed the port of Buffalo at full speed and broke every line on the Muir and the W.H. Rounds while they were docked in port, causing the latter two vessels to drift away from the pier. The Wisconsin Shipwrecks site says this was used "an example in the unsafe practice of steamers entering and exiting the port of Buffalo at full speed which would endanger other vessels."
Door County's connection to the wreck of the Muir
In 1893, the last year of the Muir's service, former Door County resident Capt. David Clow, who Baillod described as "quite a character," bought co-ownership of the vessel with Capt. Muir, according to Wisconsin Shipwrecks.
Clow and his wife, Sarah, moved to Chambers Island in 1853. He was a veteran of the shipping industry on the lakes, surviving a number of wrecks, and he and his wife started a small shipyard on the island, cutting trees for wood and building ships by hand. These included the Sarah Clow, which launched in 1862 after a seven-year build and wrecked several times before its final wreck under a different owner in 1869; and the Lewis Day, which worked from 1869 to 1881 when it ran ashore at Plum Island and, without insurance for ship or cargo, was declared a total loss, stripped and burned to salvage iron from the wreck.
Clow and his family moved from Chambers Island to Crystal Lake, Illinois, in 1872, according to his obituary, but bought into co-ownership of the Muir at age 71.
According to Shipwreck World, Clow was taking the Muir from Bay City, Michigan, to South Chicago with a cargo of bulk salt on Sept. 30, 1893, when at 5 a.m. the ship was hit by a 50 mph gale in Lake Michigan. It reportedly was weathering the storm well until about 7:30 a.m., when the waves grew dramatically larger and it fell into the trough between the waves, leading to massive amounts of water washing over its decks.
Clow made for the nearest port, which was Ahnapee, now Algoma. The Muir was within a few miles of the port when at about 8 a.m. Clow went below deck and found several feet of water in the hold. He immediately ordered the crew to abandon ship, but almost at once the ship lurched and plunged into the water.
The small yawl used as a lifeboat immediately filled with water after it was launched, but Clow and his crew of six managed to pilot the open boat through 15-foot waves, with almost constant biling of water from the yawl to keep it afloat, to land on the beach. All of the crew survived, but Clow lost his dog, the ship's mascot, and most of the crew lost all their possessions.
In the aftermath of this and the other wrecks he survived, Clow said he was quitting the maritime shipping business.
“I have quit sailing, for water no longer seems to have any liking for me,” Clow is quoted as saying by Shipwreck World. He apparently also was especially broken up by the loss of his dog, which he described as “an intelligent and faithful animal, and a great favorite with the captain and crew,” also saying, “I would rather lose any sum of money than to have the brute perish as he did.”
Finding the Muir, and virtually exploring the wreck
As with the Trinidad, the search for the Muir started with a database Baillod began compiling about 20 years ago of missing shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters. He told the Advocate the Muir was on the list because there were consistent reports of its approximate location when it sank, and those reports indicated it was close to land and therefore likely in shallower water than if it was in the middle of the lake.
"With the Muir, we had first-person accounts of the sinking and it was within sight of a port," Baillod said. "So, we had vectors for where it might be. If a ship sinks 15 miles off shore, they really can't know where they are (because they couldn't see land). The Muir was only about 2 miles off the pierhead. Debris was floating up against the lighthouse."
With the available information, Baillod was able to create a grid of about 2 by 2 miles where the remains of the Muir most likely would be. As he and Jaeck did in searching for the Trinidad, the team used sonar within the grid to try and detect the remains.
But the search for the Muir was slightly different. Baillod drew up a larger grid in which to search for the Trinidad, about 5 by 5 miles, but that vessel was intact and thus would likely make a bigger blip on the sonar.
"We knew it was gonna be in about 50-ish feet of water," Baillod said. "We also knew it'd be broken up, possibly badly, so you're looking for a debris field. We had to go a lot slower with a much narrower beam (than was used to find the Trinidad), even though it was a much smaller search field (for the Muir)."
In fact, Baillod, Jaeck and Cullen were on their final pass of the day and in the process of retrieving the sonar when the sonar detected the wreck on the far northern edge of Baillod's grid. It's in relatively shallow water and hundreds of fishing boats pass over it, yet it remained undetected for 131 years.
The team then notified Wisconsin State Maritime Archeologist Tamara Thomsen of the find. Within weeks a team of divers collected thousands of high-resolution images of the wreck, and Zach Whitrock used those images to create a 3D photogrammetry model of the wreck site that people can explore virtually on the Sketchfab website, including with a virtual reality headset.
Why is the Muir interesting?
As Baillod said above, the Muir might be more interesting to Wisconsin history and maritime buffs than the Trinidad because the Muir has a closer connection to the state. The Trinidad is more intact and therefore of great interest to maritime archeologists across the country, but its main connection to Wisconsin is that it sank in Wisconsin waters.
Baillod said although the Muir is broken up and not intact like the Trinidad, the sides of its hull fell outward when it wrecked, so it's opened up in way that makes it easier to study its inner architecture, which in itself is unique with its unusual stepped sternpost construction.
Also, all of its deck gear is still on hand and intact, including two giant anchors, hand pumps, bow windlass and capstan, and Baillod noted the remains have very few mussels blanketing them, so the remains can be seen more clearly than most other long-ago wrecks in Lake Michigan.
"She's unusually clean, so we can see her architectural features quite clearly," he said. "It's a shallower wreck, so it's accessible to a lot of underwater archeological activities."
Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 orcclough@gannett.com.
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