Many of Wisconsin’s historic structures are easily viewed, touched and toured.
The Villa Louis mansion has a prominent spot on St. Feriole Island in Prairie du Chien, the Octagon House is perched on a hill in Watertown and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin has sweeping views of the Wyoming Valley in northern Iowa County.
North Hall is passed by thousands of people a day trudging up and down Bascom Hill in Madison, the Al. Ringling Theatre in Baraboo continues to host events while the lighthouses of Door and Bayfield counties are literal beacons of history.
In contrast, the views of the Montgomery, Advance and scores of other Lake Michigan shipwrecks are out of sight and their access a logistical challenge for most tourists. Their place in state history, however, is equally as important as the brick, stone and log buildings that in some cases include gift shops and tour guides.
People are also reading…
That’s why Caitlin Zant has become proficient with a ruler, mechanical pencil and buys reams of Mylar paper.
A certified diver, Zant, 31, is a maritime archaeologist in the Wisconsin Historical Society’s historic preservation division. When she’s not diving on a wreck armed with her measuring and documentation tools, she can usually be found at her light table transposing her underwater sketches and measurements into scaled drawings that can be digitized for use in presentations, websites and educational material. Her work also shows up in the form of waterproof, plastic dive cards that help guide water-ready tourists to wrecks and provide historical background on the doomed boats.
“For me it’s always exciting to do these shallow water ones. The deep ones are really great because not everyone can see them so the information we bring up is really the only way that people can get to know them,” Zant said. “But the shallow water ones are really fun, too, because you can share the information with people and they actually can, themselves, physically go visit it, which is really neat.”
100+ years old
Many of the wrecks she and her team have documented over the years sank in the 1800s and early 1900s and are part of the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary, which, after seven years of consideration, has been named by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the nation’s 15th national marine sanctuary.
The 962-square-mile area protects 36 shipwrecks, 21 of which are on the National Register of Historic Places and includes the oldest known wreck in Wisconsin waters. The Gallinipper, a wooden schooner constructed in 1833, sank in 1851 between Sheboygan and Manitowoc on her way to pick up a load of lumber in Escanaba, Michigan. At least another 59 known wrecks have yet to be found within the sanctuary’s borders, which stretch from Port Washington north to southern Kewaunee County and to the east miles into the lake.
The wrecks in the sanctuary are representative of the vessels that sailed and steamed on Lake Michigan carrying grain and raw materials to major ports like Milwaukee and Chicago to the south and to other Great Lakes ports to the east. The vessels included sailing schooners, grand palace steamers, propeller-driven passenger ships and industrial bulk carriers. The ships brought hundreds of thousands of people to the Midwest and made possible the dramatic growth of the region’s farms, cities and industries, according to documentation submitted by the state to NOAA.
The boats succumbed to storms, poor craftsmanship, grave miscalculations by their captains or a combination of all three only to rest in the shifting sands under the lake’s surface. Some are in more than 200 feet of water. Others are in less than 15 feet of water, can be easily dived or snorkeled and are within a short paddle from shore.
“It’s driving tourism, recreation and education. It’s just awe-inspiring, too,” said Christian Overland, director and CEO of the Wisconsin Historical Society. “You don’t see this stuff every day, so maritime archaeology is a great way to bring those stories back to life.”
4 hours a day underwater
The maritime preservation and archaeology initiative at the Historical Society was created in 1988 in response to the passage of the U.S. Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987, which gave the state the responsibility to manage abandoned historic shipwrecks in state waters.
The state’s program has become an active research unit of the state archaeology program with field documentation information used to list the wrecks on the State and National Registers of Historic Places. It has also led to the creation of the Maritime Trails initiative, a collaborative effort with the UW-Madison Sea Grant Institute that encourages divers, snorkelers, boaters, maritime enthusiasts and tourists to visit wrecks in lakes Michigan and Superior.
Zant, and fellow maritime archeologist Tamara Thomsen, can spend up to four hours a day under the surface of the Lake Michigan sanctuary where, working with a team of volunteers out of a 1973 Boston Whaler, they take detailed measurements, snap photos and use mechanical pencils while underwater to draw on sheets of Mylar to document wrecks.
Last month, thanks to a grant from the Hamilton Family Foundation, Zant was among those who dove on the Advance, which rests in 85 feet of water off Cedar Grove. The 117-foot-long schooner was built in Milwaukee in 1853 and hauling bark used for tanning hides when in 1885 it sprang a leak, began taking on water and capsized. The captain and five crew members tried to reach shore in a lifeboat but it too capsized. Only one sailor survived.
The Montgomery sank in 1890 in 12 feet of water about 1,000 yards from what is now Whistling Straits golf course north of Sheboygan. Built in 1866, the 136-foot-long three-masted schooner was hauling 700 tons of coal when it ran into a rock reef during a November gale. The wreck was forgotten but rediscovered in 1958 by off-duty Army personnel based at nearby Camp Haven.
‘It’s really cool’
Divers had dove the wreck in the early 1970s, but its location was never officially documented until 2019, when after four years of casually searching for the wreck between other trips, the Montgomery was relocated, yet again, this time by the state Historical Society. Only this time it has been well documented.
“It’s really cool. People had dove it before and then it was forgotten about,” said Zant, who grew up in the flatlands of Peoria, Illinois. “You wouldn’t think that would happen, but it happens all the time. So it’s really exciting to find something again and be able to draw it.”
They begin by establishing a baseline through the middle of the wreck and using that baseline for measuring pieces of wood, masts, other debris and, in rare cases, cargo. Instead of using feet and inches, measurements are taken in feet and tenths, which more closely match the measurements used by those who built the boats over the past 180 years.
The underwater pencil drawings are later redrawn to scale on graph paper and then, with the use of a light table, are traced in ink so they can be digitally reproduced.
Zant earned a history degree from Carthage College in Kenosha and a master’s degree focused on maritime studies from East Carolina University. She became a certified diver down to 200 feet in 2012 and joined the Wisconsin Historical Society in 2014. And because there are an estimated 750 shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters, of which 210 have been located, she likely has job security for years to come.
“There’s a lot still out there to be found,” Zant said. “These are really important wrecks and it’s really exciting to me to tell those stories.”
Barry Adams covers regional news for the Wisconsin State Journal. Send him ideas for On Wisconsin at 608-252-6148 or by email at badams@madison.com.