A powerful Nor'easter that hammered the Massachusetts island of Nantucket over the weekend left something behind on the sand: the exposed timbers of a shipwreck that researchers believe has been lying in the same stretch of beach since 1884. Wooden hull planks and structural beams now jut from the sand near Point of Breakers, a south-shore beach, in a shape that unmistakably resembles the frame of a vessel.
The discovery came not from an excavation crew or a survey flight, but from a phone call. Jason Graziadei, editor-in-chief of the Nantucket Current, was covering the storm when he received a message from an island resident, David DeHart. The tip was blunt: "I found what I believe to be a shipwreck uncovered by the storm." Graziadei, who grew curious enough to check, took his son Owen with him to the south shore. "I drove out there with my son Owen and sure enough, it was right there where David said it was," he told NPR by email.
What DeHart had spotted was a set of newly visible wooden remains in a location that is no stranger to marine debris. The timbers protruded from the sand in the curved outline of a hull, exposing fresh wood that had apparently been sealed beneath the beach before the weekend's high winds and pounding surf stripped away the overlying sand. The finds occupy the same general area where fragments of a vessel were discovered in 2022 — meaning the 1884-era wreckage has surfaced, or partially resurfaced, at least twice in recent years.
That earlier find drew the attention of David Robinson, director and chief archeologist for the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources. Robinson spent several months examining the site and working alongside researchers from the Egan Maritime Institute and the Nantucket Historical Association, two Nantucket institutions with deep archives and long-standing expertise in the island's seafaring past. Together, that team assembled a body of evidence pointing to an identification: the remains most likely belonged to a schooner named the Warren Sawyer.
Robinson was careful about the limits of that conclusion. In a 2023 interview with the Nantucket Current, he described the process as one familiar to historical archaeology generally: researchers review "the available literature, archival, photographic, and archaeological evidence we collectively assembled for the site" in order "to try to arrive at a conclusive determination as to whether or not the wreckage is from the tern [sailing vessel], Warren Sawyer." His phrasing left open the possibility that the remains belonged to a different vessel, even as his working conclusion pointed to the schooner.
The Warren Sawyer was a cargo vessel that made runs between southern ports and Boston. According to accounts compiled in the years after the wreck, she was carrying bales of cotton and scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston when she went down on the night of Dec. 22, 1884 — a storm-season loss on a route that threaded past the Massachusetts coast. A vessel carrying bulk cargo would leave a distinctive archaeological signature: heavy timbers built to absorb strain, a working hull rather than a warship's fighting structure, and a cargo that would have scattered or degraded across the seabed.
For Nantucket, a confirmed identification would do more than satisfy curiosity. The island's economy and identity were built on the sea, and its museums and historical societies are accustomed to reading shipwrecks as chapters in a local maritime record rather than as curiosities. A documented schooner loss recovered from the sand would give researchers fresh material to examine and local residents a tangible piece of the island's 19th-century story to stand beside the beach where it came ashore.
Storms like the one that exposed the remains are an old ally — and occasional troublemaker — for maritime archaeologists working along the New England coast. Every major coastal storm strips sand from shoals and beaches, and occasionally lifts an object that has been buried for a century or more back into view. The flip side is that such exposure is temporary: unprotected timbers left in the surf can be battered, buried again, or washed away within a single season. That tension is one reason historical wreck sites are typically documented promptly and, where appropriate, worked under the review of the state board that Robinson directs.
The current exposure also illustrates how a discovery can travel through a community before it reaches an institution. DeHart was not an archaeologist and was not looking for a shipwreck; he noticed an unusual feature on a beach he knows. Graziadei, already reporting on the storm, had the means to reach the site and document it. Robinson and the two local institutions supplied the historical framework. The chain from curbside observation to professional assessment moved quickly, and photographs by Jason Graziadei for the Nantucket Current now document the remains in the sand.
For the moment, the Warren Sawyer's timbers remain where the storm revealed them, visible at low tide and intermittently hidden as the surf rolls over them. The Nor'easter that battered Nantucket is gone, replaced by clear skies and a visible hull shape in the sand. Whether additional work will follow depends in large part on the continuing interest of the state archaeologist and his Nantucket partners, but the timbers themselves have already delivered the most important part of their story: after more than a century and a half, the shape of the Warren Sawyer — or a ship much like her — is once again above water, pointed out by a resident to a local editor who went to look.
(0)