As an early wooden schooner, Advance provides historians and archaeologists the chance to study early schooner construction and the Great Lakes lumber and grain trades.

Located 9.5 miles southwest of the Sheboygan Harbor entrance, in the town of Holland, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, the schooner Advance sits upright on the silt and clay bottom of Lake Michigan in 85 feet of water. The ship remains broken on the lakebed. Today, the vessel sits upright and broken on the lake bottom with most of its hull components extant and artifacts located within the hull, including the vessel’s centerboard, windlass, bowsprit, and jibboom.

Advance was built at the shipyard of J.M. Jones in 1853 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The vessel operated in the Great Lakes lumber and grain trades throughout its career. On 8 September 1885, the vessel began to leak during a gale while carrying a cargo of bark wood. Eventually, the vessel became fully waterlogged and capsized while 9.5 miles southeast of Sheboygan. The captain, four crew members, and two passengers made it to the vessel’s yawl but drowned within 200 feet of shore when the small boat overturned in the crashing surf, leaving only one survivor.

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