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LIBERTY GROVE, Wis. - The Wisconsin Historical Society announces the listing of the Sunshine shipwreck in the National Register of Historic Places on October 30, 2023. The Sunshine sits, upright and broken, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, approximately one mile southeast of the entrance to North Bay.

Built in 1856 in Detroit, Michigan, Sunshine was one of a unique class of Great Lakes vessels: the scow schooner. Much of our understanding of this vessel type, and the lakeshoring trade in which they operated, has come from archaeological data recovered from wreck sites. Little historical documentation exists on scow schooner construction and operation.

The vessel spent the later part of its career carrying lumber from unimproved ports in northern Michigan to larger ports along Lake Michigan’s western shore. In September 1869, Sunshine was caught in a gale while off the coast of Door County. Water began to fill the vessel’s hold and it was pushed closer and closer to shore. Eventually, the vessel was driven up on the rocks on the north side of the mouth of North Bay, where it was abandoned, still filled with most of its cargo of lumber. Before the vessel could be salvaged, another storm lifted it off the rocks and moved it further up into the bay, where the vessel came to rest in shallow water.

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 Boaz shipwreck is available at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/NationalRegister/NR2772.

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.