Searchers find missing ship in Lake Michigan, over 150 years after it sunk

Searchers recently discovered the wreck of one of the “most sought-after missing ships” in Lake Michigan, that had sunk to the bottom of the lake over 150 years ago.A shipwreck hunter and scuba diver named Paul Ehorn made the discovery after having searched for the Lac La Belle passenger steamer for nearly 60 years. Shipwreck World, a group that works to locate shipwrecks around the globe, announced on Friday that the team led by Ehorn found the wreck about 20 miles (32km) offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin.Ehorn’s Lac La Belle discovery took place in October 2022. The announcement was delayed because his team wanted to include a three-dimensional video model of the ship, but poor weather and other commitments kept his dive team from going back down to the wreck until last summer, he told the Associated Press in an interview.Ehorn, 80, has been searching for shipwrecks since he was 15 years old. He said that he’s been trying to pinpoint the Lac La Belle’s location since 1965. He used a clue from fellow wreck hunter and author Ross Richardson in 2022 to narrow down his search grid and found the ship using side-scan sonar after just two hours on the lake, he said.“It’s kind of a game, like solve the puzzle. Sometimes you don’t have many pieces to put the puzzle together but this one worked out and we found it right away,” he said. The finding left him “super elated”.Ehorn declined to discuss the clue that led to the discovery.Richardson said in a short telephone interview on Sunday that he learned that a commercial fisherman at a “certain location” had snagged what Richardson called an item specific to steamships from the 1800s. He declined to elaborate further on how competitive shipwreck hunting has become and how the information could alert searchers to another way to conduct research.The luxury passenger steamer, called the Lac La Belle, set off from Milwaukee to Grand Haven, Michigan, one October night in 1872, with 53 passengers and crew as well as a cargo of 19,000 bushels of barley, 1,200 barrels of flour, 50 barrels of pork and 25 barrels of whiskey, according to Shipwreck World.About two hours into the trip, the ship began to leak uncontrollably. The captain turned the ship back to Milwaukee, but huge waves came crashing over, extinguishing its boilers. The storm drove the ship south. At around 5am, the captain ordered lifeboats lowered and the ship went down stern first.One of the lifeboats capsized on the way to shore, killing eight people. The other lifeboats made landfall along the Wisconsin coast.According to an account on Shipwreck World, the Lac La Belle was built in 1864 in Cleveland, Ohio. The massive 217ft (66-meter) steamer ran between Cleveland and Lake Superior but sank in the St Clair River in 1866 after a collision. The ship was raised in 1869, and reconditioned.According to Ehorn, the ship’s exterior is covered with mussels and the upper cabins are gone, but the hull looks intact and the oak interiors are still in good shape.The Great Lakes are home to anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, Discover reported. Shipwreck hunters have been searching the lakes with more urgency in recent years out of concerns that invasive quagga mussels are slowly destroying wrecks.The Lac La Belle is the 15th shipwreck Ehorn has located, the Associated Press reports.“It was one more to put a checkmark by,” Ehron said. “Now it’s on to the next one. It’s getting harder and harder. The easier ones have been found.”Ehorn will be presenting the discovery in person at the 2026 Ghost Ships Festival in Wisconsin in March, along with video and more images of the wreck.