Searchers find the wreck of a luxury steamboat that was lost in Lake Michigan more than 150 years ago

MADISON, Wis. — Searchers have discovered the wreckage of a luxury steamboat that sank in a storm in Lake Michigan in the late 1800s, completing a search that began nearly 60 years ago.

Shipwreck World, a group that locates shipwrecks around the world, announced Friday that a team led by Illinois shipwreck hunter Paul Ehorn found Lac La Belle in October 2022 about 20 miles offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Ehorn told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Sunday that the announcement was delayed because his team wanted to include a three-dimensional video model of the ship, but bad weather and other commitments kept his dive team from returning to the wreck until last summer.

Ehorn, 80, has been searching for shipwrecks since he was 15. He said he has been trying to determine the location of Lac La Belle since 1965. He used a lead from fellow wreck hunter and author Ross Richardson in 2022 to refine 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 solving the puzzle. Sometimes you don’t have many pieces to put the puzzle together, but this one worked and we found it right away,” he said. The finding made him “super excited.”

Ehorn declined to discuss the clue that led to the discovery. Richardson said in a brief telephone interview Sunday that he had learned that a commercial fisherman at a “certain location” had caught what Richardson called an item specific to 19th century steamships. He declined to elaborate on how competitive shipwreck hunting has become, saying the information could alert searchers to another way to investigate.

According to a report on Shipwreck World, Lac La Belle was built in 1864 in Cleveland, Ohio. The 210-foot steamboat sailed between Cleveland and Lake Superior, but sank in 1866 after a collision in the St. Clair River. The ship was raised and overhauled in 1869.

The ship left Milwaukee for Grand Haven, Michigan, in a storm on the night of October 13, 1872, with 53 passengers and crew and a cargo of barley, pork, flour and whiskey. About two hours into the voyage, the ship began taking on water uncontrollably. The captain turned Lac La Belle back towards Milwaukee, but huge waves crashed over her and extinguished her boilers. The storm drove the ship south. About 5 a.m. the captain ordered the lifeboats to be lowered and the ship went down stern.

One of the lifeboats capsized on its way to shore, killing eight people. The other rescue boats came ashore along the Wisconsin coast between Racine and Kenosha.

The wreck’s exterior is covered in quagga mussels and the upper cabins are gone, Ehorn said, but the hull appears intact and the oak interior is still in good condition.

The Great Lakes are home to between 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks, most of which remain undiscovered, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Water Library. Shipwreck hunters have searched the lakes with more urgency in recent years out of concern that invasive quagga mussels are slowly destroying wrecks.

Lac La Belle is the 15th shipwreck that Ehorn has located. “It was another one to check off,” he said. “Now it’s time for the next one. It’s getting harder. The easier ones have been found.”