One of the hundreds of lost ships sitting at the bottom of Lake Michigan has been found, more than 150 years after it sank to the depths.
Shipwreck World, a group that looks for sunken ships, said that the Lac La Belle was found 20 miles offshore between Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, The Associated Press reported.
The ship was built in 1864 in Cleveland and ran between Cleveland and Lake Superior. It sank in 1866 in the St. Clair River but was raised three years later and refurbished. It was used as a bulk freighter after the repairs were done.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called the Lac La Belle one of the most popular and luxurious passenger steamers of the time.
In October 1872, the ship left Milwaukee for Grand Haven, Michigan, during a gale. There were 53 people on board. Two hours into the voyage, the Lac La Belle took on water and the captain decided to turn back. Waves came over the ship, extinguishing the boilers. The storm pushed the ship south and about 5 a.m. on Oct. 14, the captain ordered lifeboats lowered and the ship sank stern first.
Eight people were killed when one of the lifeboats capsized. The others made landfall on the Wisconsin coast.
The wreckage was found in October 2022, but Paul Ehorn, who led the team that found the site, said the announcement was delayed because his team wanted to make a three-dimensional video model of the ship. However, bad weather and scheduling prevented the team from diving until last summer.
Eighty-year-old Ehorn, who has been looking for wrecks since he was 15, said he started looking for the ship in 1965, but thanks to a clue from Ross Richardson in 2022, he was able to narrow the search. It was the 15th shipwreck found by Ehorn, the AP reported.
“As a woodworker myself, I appreciate the hand craftsmanship that went into these early vessels. The Lac La Belle was close to home for me and is a wreck that’s always been on my radar,” Ehorn said in a news release.
Ehorn found the SS Senator in 2005. The Senator went down on Halloween 1929 in Port Washington, killing nine people and losing 268 Nash automobiles, the Journal Sentinel said.
Once he did, it only took him two hours using side-scan sonar to locate the Lac La Belle.
“It’s kind of a game, like solve the puzzle. Sometimes you don’t have many pieces to put the puzzle together but this one worked out and we found it right away,” Ehorn said.
Richardson told the AP that a commercial fisherman snagged an item that was specific to steam ships of the Lac La Belle’s time. He did not say exactly what was found.
The ship’s hull is intact, but the upper cabins are gone. The Lac La Belle is sitting upright on the bottom of the lake, the Journal Sentinel reported.
It is estimated that between 6,000 and 10,000 ships lay at the bottom of the Great Lakes. There are between 600 and 1,500 in Lake Michigan, according to WTTW.
“Frankly, I think it could even be more, because Lake Michigan was the busiest of all the Great Lakes, with major cities like Chicago and Milwaukee,” Ted Karamanski, Loyola University Chicago professor emeritus, told WTTW.
Ehorn will speak about the discovery at the 2026 Ghost Ships Festival in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, next month, the Journal Sentinel said.
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