Just over 13 miles northeast of the Sheboygan Harbor lighthouse, in the town of Haven, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, the schooner Abiah lies on the clay and silt covered bottom of Lake Michigan in 220 feet of water. The ship remains mostly intact on the lakebed, although a section of its deck planking and port side hull are not extant. Abiah was launched into the waters of Cattaraugus Creek from the shipyard of Charles Stevens in Irving, New York in the late summer of 1847. The vessel operated in the Great Lakes grain and lumber trades throughout its career. In 1850, Abiah and the schooner Patrick Henry departed Buffalo together with the first locomotives, rails and hardware for the newly organized Milwaukee & Waukesha (later known as the Milwaukee & Mississippi Rail Road), carrying the locomotive to Milwaukee. In September 1855, Abiah was struck by a sudden squall and capsized while in route to Oconto from Chicago. The vessel was towed, upside down, to within 15.0 miles of Sheboygan, where the vessel was finally overtaken by the waves and sunk.

Today, the vessel sits upright and largely intact on the lake bottom with its hull components extant and artifacts located within the hull. As one of the earliest known wooden schooners in Wisconsin waters, Abiah provides historians and archaeologists the rare chance to study early wooden schooner construction and the early grain and lumber trades. State and federal laws protect this shipwreck. Divers may not remove artifacts or structure when visiting this 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.

Wisconsin Shipwrecks