Shipwreck

At 1:30 in the morning of April 27, 1850, the sidewheel steamboat General Anthony Wayne suffered a boiler explosion and sank in Lake Erie. 38 people lost their lives. Now an amateur underwater detective, Thomas Kowalczk, has located the wreck in 50 feet of water about 8 miles North of Vermilion, Ohio.

Thomas Kowalczk, an amateur shipwreck prospector, used sonar on his boat to discover the General Anthony Wayne in 50 feet of water, about eight miles north of this northeast Ohio city, the Great Lakes Historical Society announced Wednesday.

The side-wheel steamship, named in honor of Revolutionary War hero Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne, sank in April 1850 while en route from the Toledo area to Buffalo, N.Y. Thirty-eight of the 93 passengers and crew on board died.

"I researched everything I could about it and knew the general area where the ship went down," Kowalczk said. "I laid out a grid search pattern and starting hunting."

Kowalczk saw an image of the wreckage on his sonar screen in September. He dived down in May and photographed the wreckage, which is in two sections.

Kowalczk, along with members of the Cleveland Underwater Explorers or CLUE, plan to survey the site as soon as water visibility improves. The CLUE website plans to have pictures of the find posted sometime tomorrow (Friday). Here is local television coverage of the announcement. For a good discussion of steamboat explosions and the laws that were enacted to address them (and how that legislation is still impacting us today because of the precedent it set) here's an article from American Heritage.