During a family trip to Point Farms Provincial Park north of Goderich, Ont., in 2023, Lucas Atchison was using a metal detector that he got as a gift for his birthday, when he found something big and old.
“We were on the beach, we got our metal detector out, and as soon as we set it up, ding! It was a spike from the shipwreck,” Lucas said, who is now 10.
He recalls alerting his dad, who at first thought the spike may have been used to tie up a boat. But Lucas wasn’t convinced, and the pair started digging deeper. What they found was more spikes attached to wood.
“Then Dad told me, ‘Lucas this is a shipwreck,'” the boy explained. “When I woke up that morning I did not expect to find a shipwreck!”
Dad Jason Atchison said they reported the find to provincial parks staff, and then reached out to the Ontario Marine Heritage Committee (OMHC), a non-profit volunteer group dedicated to recording and preserving marine history.
This week, with Lucas keeping a close eye on the work, excavation on the shipwreck began with an OMHC team digging to see exactly what Lucas found.
Excavation work begins
The approvals process to dig takes time, with regulatory requirements needing to be met, according to marine archeologist Scarlett Janusas and marine historian Patrick Folkes.
They first met the Atchisons in the fall of 2023 at the beach to show them where they should be looking. Then, on Wednesday, a group of volunteers from the OMHC arrived with heavy machinery supplied by the provincial park, and then switching to hand shovels, trowels and brushes to see what the sand had buried.
So far, Janusas said they found a smaller portion of the ship than they had hoped, but determined the section was frames from the side of the ship.
“We had double frames, which seems to suggest that it was stronger-built ship and we believe that it was a schooner,” said Janusas. “A schooner is usually a two-masted sailing vessel, usually wooden.”
Maybe the St. Anthony?
There wasn’t enough of the ship to definitively determine its identity, but Folkes says one candidate is the schooner St. Anthony.
“[It] was wrecked in October of 1856 on a voyage … from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, with a load of grain,” he said. “It was described as having gone ashore four miles north of Goderich, which fits about where this wreckage is, and this would only represent a very small piece.”
The volunteers will complete scale drawings of the wreck, including a plan view (from on top) and profile (side view) of the wreck.
Folkes says that 19th century insurance requirements would specify how many fasteners, or spikes, should be placed in the frames and at what distance. Those details, he said, will help determine the ship’s age.
What comes next might be surprising. The volunteers will then rebury the ship to preserve it.
“We fill the hole back in, bury it and create an anaerobic environment, i.e. without oxygen, so you don’t have any kind of parasites in there or any other organisms that will eat or destroy the wreckage,” said Janusas.
“It’s not a perfect solution but it does maintain the structure of that ship probably for at least another 50 years.”
