9 miles northeast of Hika Park, Lake Michigan

Summary

Home Shipwreck (Schooner)
Lake Michigan, Town of Centerville, Manitowoc County
Construction dates: 1843
Builder: William B. Redfield

The schooner Home lies upright in 170 feet of water in Lake Michigan. Shipwright William B. Redfield constructed this small lakeshoring schooner in Portland (Sandusky), Ohio, in 1843. The Home worked as a lakeshoring vessel on Lake Erie primarily carrying grain and merchandise between Sandusky, Ohio, and Buffalo, New York, for owner Captain Morris Tyler. She spent her last five years of operation on Lake Michigan working in the lumber trade. While enroute to Chicago from Manitowoc in 1858, the Home was lost in an early morning collision with the schooner William Fiske off Cleveland, Wisconsin.

The Home is representative of a relatively undocumented vessel type and trade, Great Lakes lakeshoring, and provides historians and archaeologists the rare chance to study this little-documented vessel class. Once common on the Great Lakes, these small schooners occupied a special niche in the Great Lake’s regional economy, providing important economic and cultural links between frontier coastal communities. Their construction and operation was largely undocumented during the nineteenth century, however, and today the lakeshoring schooner is one of the least understood vessel classes to have sailed the Great Lakes.

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.

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