Fisherman discovers historic shipwreck in the fog in Lake Michigan: “It sat there for over 100 years”

A Wisconsin angler fishing in the fog this week discovered the wreck of an abandoned tugboat submerged in the waters of Lake Michigan for more than a century, state officials announced Friday.

Wisconsin Historical Society Maritime Archaeologist Tamara Thomsen said that the society confirmed that Christopher Thuss found the wreck of the J.C. Ames. Thuss was fishing in Lake Michigan off the city of Manitowoc in foggy conditions on Tuesday when he noticed the wreckage in nine feet of water off a breakwater, she said in a message to The Associated Press.

The society said that according to the book “Green Bay Workhorses: The Nau Tug Line,” the Rand and Burger shipbuilding company in Manitowoc built the J.C. Ames in 1881 to help move lumber. The tug was one of the largest and most powerful on the Great Lakes, with a 670-horsepower engine.

The tug served multiple purposes beyond moving lumber, including transporting railway cars. It eventually fell into disrepair and was scuttled in 1923, as was the practice then when ships outlived their usefulness, Thomsen said.

The ship had been buried in the sand at the bottom of the lake for decades before storms this winter apparently revealed it, Thomsen said. A lack of quagga mussels attached to the ship indicates it was only recently exposed, she said.

Historians are racing to locate shipwrecks and downed planes in the Great Lakes before quagga mussels destroy them. Quagga have become the dominant invasive species in the lower lakes over the last 30 years, attaching themselves to wooden shipwrecks and sunken aircraft in layers so thick they eventually crush the wreckage.

“These kinds of discoveries are always so exciting because it allows a piece of lost history to resurface. It sat there for over a hundred years and then came back on our radar completely by chance,” Thomsen said in a statement. “We are grateful that Chris Thuss noticed the wreck and reported it so we can share this story with the Wisconsin communities that this history belongs to.”

In September, maritime historians Brendon Baillod and Bob Jaeck announced they had discovered the wreck of the John Evenson, a towing tug was lost in June 1895 while assisting a freighter as it was entering the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal in Lake Michigan. The two historians also found the schooner Margaret A. Muir in June 2024.

In March 2024, the wreck of the steamship Milwaukee, which sank after colliding with another vessel in 1886, was found 360 feet below the water’s surface in Lake Michigan.

That discovery came just a few months after a man and his daughter found the remains of a ship that sank in Lake Michigan 15 years before the Milwaukee, in 1871. 

Experts estimate more than 6,000 ships have gone down in the Great Lakes since the late 1600s.