The Lake Serpent Is The Oldest-Known Shipwreck To Have Been Discovered In Lake Erie
In September 1829, the 47-foot schooner Lake Serpent left Cleveland, Ohio, for the Lake Erie Islands. After making the 55-mile trip, the ship’s crew collected limestone from the island to bring back to Cleveland.
However, the ship never returned, one of the thousands lost to the Great Lakes. The bodies of Captain Ezera Wright and his brother Robert washed ashore just west of Cleveland.
In 2018, the National Museum of the Great Lakes, located in Toledo, announced that the Lake Serpent’s wreckage had been found. It was the oldest-known shipwreck ever discovered in Lake Erie.
The Lake Serpent was first detected in 2015 when something small showed up on a scan near Kelleys Island. At first, it was dismissed as nothing more than a rock, but later that year, a dive revealed it to be a small wooden schooner. It was buried under decades of sediment.
Researchers initially believed that the remains were of the Lexington, a schooner that sank in the 1840s. But after conducting a few more dives, they concluded that the wreck was actually the Lake Serpent.
They took measurements, examined the construction of the ship, and looked for any artifacts that confirmed it was the Lake Serpent.
Historical records show that the ship had an intricate carving of a snake on its bow, and the divers identified an engraving in that very spot.
Furthermore, a newspaper article from 1829 reported that the boat had been carrying a load of stone from Kelleys Island, and boulders were uncovered in the ship’s hold.
If the stones had been obtained after the quarries opened in 1830, they would have been smoother blocks, not boulders. With all this information taken together, the museum was 75 percent certain that the wreck was the Lake Serpent.
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The schooner was built in 1821 in Cleveland. At the time, the city had less than 1,000 residents. The vessel’s job was to carry cargo to ports along the lakes, including flour, produce, whiskey, and limestone. It sunk eight years later in the unpredictable waters of Lake Erie.
The Lake Serpent was not the only shipwreck the museum has found. In March 2018, the museum announced the discovery of the Margaret Olwill, a 554-foot barge carrying limestone from Kelleys Island. The ship sailed into a small storm, which quickly turned dangerous. Ultimately, it sunk in 1899.
The Great Lakes contain more shipwrecks per square mile than other bodies of water in the world. More than 2,000 are in Lake Erie alone.
Erie is the shallowest of the five Great Lakes, which makes it easier to find shipwrecks, but the downside is that they are usually in poor condition because they are not preserved as well as they would be in deeper waters.
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