140-year-old shipwreck piece

140-year-old shipwreck piece washes ashore on remote stretch of Sleeping Bear Dunes beach

Garret Ellison | gellison@mlive.com
LEELANAU COUNTY — A substantial hull piece that shipwreck experts believe comes from the schooner Jennie and Annie, which sunk in the Manitou Passage in 1872, has washed up on a remote stretch of Lake Michigan beach north of Empire in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

The 140-year-old shipwreck piece was discovered by photographer Mark Lindsay of Kingsley, who was taking a walk through the dunes with his camera on Sunday morning when he came across the relic in the shoreline waves.

“I just happened upon it,” he said. “It was incredible.”

Sleeping Bear Dunes historians believe the schooner fragment, estimated to be about 40-feet long and peppered with twisted metals spikes, is part of the ship’s bilge keelsons, which the Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archeology says were long timbers running most of the ship’s length, strengthening the keel.

It’s one of several fragments of the wreck to wash ashore over the years, said Laura Quackenbush, museum technician with park service. In fact, wreck fragments from the Jennie and Annie, as well as other ships which foundered off the dunes coastline, wash ashore once or twice a year.

“It’s a very dynamic shoreline,” she said. “It’s a common occurrence around there.”

The fragments are technically owned by the state of Michigan, said Quackenbush, although the Sleeping Bear Dunes is a national park. The Manitou Passage is a state underwater preserve and control over the myriad of shipwrecks on the bottom is governed as if they were in a museum.

In fact, the fragment discovered by Lindsay may have surfaced before, she said.

The state doesn’t mind people checking out the wreck fragments, but it’s illegal to disturb them. They are generally left to nature because preservation is pricey and the pieces are actually better off being rolling back into the waves, eventually, where cold water preserves them naturally.

The Jennie and Annie was one of the wrecks surveyed in 1995 when the passage was being readied as an underwater preserve, Quackenbush said.

The ship, named for relatives of Port Oneida founder Thomas Kelderhouse, foundered in a mid-November storm north of Sleeping Bear Point. Six or seven people died.

In a 2009 interview with the Leelanau Enterprise, Steve Harold, director of the Manistee County Historical Museum, said the ship most likely lost control and was blown onto the beach.

“There it went to pieces in a short time with the crew finding temporary safety in the rigging,” he said. “Finally, most of the crew drowned trying to reach shore after the vessel disintegrated.”

Quackenbush said there’s not too much concrete information about this particular fragment known yet. The park service collects and indexes information on the wreck fragments as they appear.

It’s located north of North Bar Lake near Empire, but south of Sleeping Bear Point, about a 40-minute hike west from the Glen Haven trail-head, according to Lindsay. It likely washed up or was uncovered during recent storms.
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