Boater finds century-old shipwreck off Door County, identified as Frank D. Barker
DOOR COUNTY (WLUK) — A shipwreck's location that was unknown for over a century was discovered this summer by a boater off the coast of Door County.
Matt Olson, owner of Door County Adventure Rafting, was scouting for sites to take his customers near Rowleys Bay when he caught sight of a submerged shipwreck.
"I was looking on satellite images of the waters around the peninsula around here, and I happened to come across this sort of anomaly in the water. This object that maybe could be a shipwreck, maybe it's not," Olson said.
The 137-foot-long wooden schooner was sitting below just a shallow 24 feet of water. Many shipwrecks lie undiscovered for years, sitting under hundreds of feet of water, but this one was different.
"When we pulled the boat over it, we could faintly see it from the surface and that's why I was surprised no one had come across it yet," Olson said.
The State Historic Preservation Office and maritime archaeologists with the Wisconsin Historical Society conducted follow-up diving missions that revealed the vessel is the long-lost Frank D. Barker, constructed in 1867 and sunk in 1887 after running upon a limestone outcropping amid foggy conditions.
The Frank D. Barker was bound for Escanaba, Michigan, to collect a load of iron ore when bad weather caused the two-masted vessel to run off course. The ship’s captain and crew struggled to correct course, but ultimately became stranded on nearby Spider Island until weather conditions improved.
"It was running light, it had no cargo, so it was sitting very high in the water and it got blown over this shoal that's on the end of Spider Island," Wisconsin Historical Society Maritime Archaeologist Tamara Thomsen said.
A tugboat called the Spalding was dispatched the following day to attempt recovery of the Frank D. Barker, but was unsuccessful. A later salvage mission in October 1887 and again in June, August, September and October of 1888 also failed, causing a total loss of the vessel valued around $8,000 at the time -- over $250,000 in today’s dollars.
The Frank D. Barker is constructed of wood and was built by Simon G. Johnson in Clayton, New York. It is a unique vessel type to the Great Lakes and was specially designed for transporting grain from ports in Milwaukee and Chicago to Lake Ontario. On its return trip west, it brought coal from ports on Lake Erie that would be used to fuel factories and heat homes of the Midwest.
Olson, a Door County local who grew up hunting for shipwrecks in Lake Michigan, is no stranger to maritime discoveries and reported a different shipwreck to the Wisconsin Historical Society just last year that turned out to be the Grey Eagle, a schooner built in 1857 that sank in 1869. Olson was also responsible for locating the Sunshine, a scow schooner that was listed to the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.
"There's a lot of history around here in Door County and throughout the rest of the state, and a lot of this stuff has kind of been forgotten about, you know. A lot of these shipwrecks and their locations," Olson said.
The Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeology team is working to allocate project funds for an archaeological survey next year to further document and record the wreck site, which would allow it to be eligible for future listing to the National Register of Historic Places.
"There's a lot of wreckage down there. It feel like there's like a football field of oak on the bottom and the entire shipwreck is there laid out on the bottom," Thomsen said.
State and federal laws protect this shipwreck. Divers may not remove artifacts or structure when visiting this site. Removing, defacing, displacing or destroying artifacts or sites is a crime.
The Frank D. Barker is the latest shipwreck to be found in Northeast Wisconsin waterways.
In July, FOX 11 brought you the story of the 145-year-old LW Crane, which was discovered in the Fox River in Oshkosh.
