139-Year-Old Shipwreck Found in Lake Michigan

After decades of scouring the bottom of Lake Michigan, searchers have finally found the wreckage of a cargo schooner that sank during a ferocious storm almost 140 years ago off the Wisconsin coastline. The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association announced Monday that a team led by researcher Brandon Baillod found the wreck of the FJ King. Baillod told the AP that the wreckage was discovered on June 28.

• According to the announcement, Baillod's team found the ship off Bailey's Harbor, a town of about 280 people on Wisconsin's Door Peninsula, an outcropping of land jutting into Lake Michigan that gives the state its distinctive mitten-thumb shape.

• The FJ King was a 144-foot three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 in Toledo, Ohio, to transport grain and iron ore. According to the announcement, the ship ran into a gale off the Door Peninsula on Sept. 15, 1886, while moving iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago.
• Waves estimated at 8 to 10 feet ruptured her seams and after several hours of pumping, Captain William Griffin ordered his men into the ship's yawl boat. The schooner finally sank bow-first around 2am with the ship's stern deckhouse blowing away in the storm, sending Griffin's papers 50 feet into the air. A passing schooner picked up the crew and took them to Bailey's Harbor.
• Searchers have been trying to find the FJ King since the 1970s but conflicting accounts of the ship's location when it sank stymied their efforts. Griffin reported that the ship went down about 5 miles off Bailey's Harbor, but a lighthouse keeper reported seeing a schooner's masts breaking the surface closer to shore. Shipwreck hunters scoured the area but came up empty. Over the years, the FJ King developed a reputation among shipwreck hunters as a ghost ship.

• Baillod believed that Griffin may not have known where he was in the darkness as the ship went down. He drew a 2-square-mile grid around the location the lighthouse keeper gave and proceeded to search it. Side-scan radar uncovered an object measuring about 140 feet long less than half a mile from the lighthouse keeper's location. It turned out to be the FJ King.
• "A few of us had to pinch each other," Baillod said in the announcement. "After all the previous searches, we couldn't believe we had actually found it, and so quickly." He said the hull appears to be intact, surprising searchers who expected to find it in pieces due to the weight of the iron ore the schooner was carrying.
• The Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association has now discovered five wrecks in the last three years. Earlier in 2025, the group found the steamer LW Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Last year, they found tugboat John Evenson and schooner Margaret A. Muir off Algoma, Wisconsin. Baillod discovered the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.