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Town of Holland, Sheboygan County, WI. - The Wisconsin Historical Society announces the listing of the Advance shipwreck in the National Register of Historic Places on July 5, 2023. The Advance lies submerged in Lake Michigan about nine and a half miles southwest of Sheboygan Harbor.

Advance was built in 1853 in Milwaukee and operated in the Great Lakes lumber and grain trades throughout its career. On September 8, 1885, the vessel began to leak during a gale while carrying a cargo of bark wood and capsized while nine and a half miles southeast of Sheboygan. The captain, four crew members, and two passengers made it to the vessel’s yawl. All but one drowned within 200 feet of shore when the small boat overturned in the crashing surf.

Today, the vessel sits upright and broken on the lake bottom with most of its hull components extant and artifacts located within the hull. As an early wooden schooner, Advance provides historians and archaeologists the chance to study early schooner construction as well as the Great Lakes lumber and grain trades.

More information on Wisconsin’s historic shipwrecks may be found by visiting Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Shipwrecks website at www.wisconsinshipwrecks.org               

Additional information for the Advance is available at

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/NationalRegister/NR2765

To learn more about the State and National Register programs in Wisconsin, visit https://wisconsinhistory.org/hp/register/

About the Wisconsin Historical Society

The Wisconsin Historical Society, founded in 1846, ranks as one of the largest, most active and most diversified state historical societies in the nation. As both a state agency and a private membership organization, its mission is to help people connect to the past by collecting, preserving and sharing stories. The Wisconsin Historical Society serves millions of people every year through a wide range of sites, programs and services. For more information, visit wisconsinhistory.org.