Wreck of 19th-century schooner F.J. King located off Wisconsin after decades-long search

MADISON, Wis. — After decades of searches, a team of underwater archaeologists has located the wreck of the three-masted schooner F.J. King in Lake Michigan off Bailey’s Harbor, Wisconsin, officials said Monday.

The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association announced that researcher Brendon Baillod’s team found the wreck on June 28. The F.J. King, a 144-foot cargo schooner built in Toledo, Ohio, in 1867, sank during a gale on Sept. 15, 1886, while carrying iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago. The entire crew survived after abandoning ship; a passing schooner rescued them and landed them at Bailey’s Harbor.

Contemporary accounts describe waves of 8 to 10 feet that ruptured the schooner’s seams. After hours of pumping, Captain William Griffin ordered the crew into the yawl boat and the F.J. King sank bow-first around 2 a.m. Witnesses reported the ship’s stern deckhouse being blown away and Griffin’s papers being carried aloft by the storm.

Searchers have sought the F.J. King since the 1970s, but conflicting reports about the vessel’s last position and scattered debris reports frustrated efforts. Griffin’s report placed the sinking about 5 miles off Bailey’s Harbor, while a local lighthouse keeper described seeing masts breaking the surface much closer to shore. Commercial fishermen also reported retrieving wreckage in nets. Baillod said he drew a two-square-mile grid around the lighthouse keeper’s coordinates and used systematic sonar scanning.

Side-scan sonar detected an object measuring roughly 140 feet less than half a mile from the lighthouse keeper’s location. Divers and archaeologists confirmed the identification as the F.J. King and reported that the wooden hull appears largely intact — a surprising result given the iron ore cargo that would have strained the ship’s structure as it foundered.

"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 noted that the wreck is covered with quagga mussels, an invasive species that poses a growing threat to submerged cultural resources in the Great Lakes.

The discovery adds to a string of recent finds by the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association. In 2025 the group documented the steamer L.W. Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh and the tugboat John Evenson and schooner Margaret A. Muir off Algoma; Baillod located the schooner Trinidad off Algoma in 2023.

Experts estimate the Great Lakes contain between 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks, many yet to be discovered, according to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library. Interest in locating and documenting these wrecks has increased as scientists and archaeologists raise concerns that quagga mussels and other ecological changes accelerate deterioration and obscure wreck sites.

Officials said documentation of the F.J. King will continue, with detailed mapping and recording to inform preservation decisions. The site’s relatively intact hull offers opportunities to study construction techniques of mid-19th century schooners and to better understand the risks invasive species pose to submerged heritage in freshwater environments.