Located seven miles northeast of Sheboygan in Lake Michigan, the scow schooner Silver Lake lies upright in 200 feet of water with nearly all hull structure and rigging intact. M. L. Johnson constructed the small scow schooner in 1889 at a remote shipyard in Little Point Sable, Michigan. The overall length of the Silver Lake's hull is 98.5 feet with a beam of 20.5 feet; her most unusual feature is that she was constructed with two centerboards. In late May 1900, while en route from Eagle Harbor (Ephraim) to Racine, the Silver Lake encountered a dense fog off Manitowoc and was run down by the car ferry Pere Marquette with the loss of one of her crew.

The Silver Lake operated primarily in the Lake Michigan lumber trade at the height of the lumber boom. Scow schooners were vital to many small communities around Lake Michigan, connecting them with regional markets through the lakeshoring trade. As vessel size grew throughout the nineteenth century, so too did their draft, making stops at small lakeshore communities with shallow harbors difficult or impossible. The flat-bottomed scows, however, were well-suited to shallow harbors. Inexpensive transportation, the scow schooner was the life-blood of many lakeshore communities.

Today, the Silver Lake is the only known example of a double centerboard scow schooner in Wisconsin waters, perhaps the Great Lakes, and provides historians and archaeologists the rare chance to study and document this vessel type. Little historical documentation exists on scow schooner construction and operation. Much of our understanding of this type of vessel lies on the lakebed and comes from archaeological data recovered from wreck sites like the Silver Lake.

State and federal laws protect this shipwreck. Divers may not remove artifacts or structure when visiting this shipwreck site. Removing, defacing, displacing or destroying artifacts or sites is a crime. More information on Wisconsin's historic shipwrecks may be found by visiting Wisconsin's Great Lakes Shipwrecks website.