Leelanau's Coast Holds 1,500 Shipwrecks — and Its Largest Remains Missing

While the Edmund Fitzgerald has been in the news for the 50th anniversary of its sinking, Lake Michigan and Leelanau County have their own rich histories of shipwrecks, says Kim Kelderhouse of the Leelanau Historical Society & Museum. November is also the anniversary of the wreck of the Bradley, she says.

The Bradley, a freighter laden with a load of crushed stone, foundered near Beaver Island in 1958. Others at the bottom of Lake Michigan include Lady Elgin, the Rouse Simmons (a.k.a. the Christmas Tree Ship), and the Alpena. Le Griffon, the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes, was lost a month after its launch.

There are an estimated 550 ships at the bottom of Lake Superior, the largest and deepest of the Great Lakes. But Lake Michigan’s waters have claimed nearly three times more: An estimated 1,500 wrecks lie beneath its waters. Kelderhouse says many of those lie close to the shores of Leelanau County, in and around the Manitou Passage, the once-busy shipping route just off the county’s coast.

Local author and diver Ross Richardson (pictured) has discovered several of those wrecks.

His discoveries include the W.C. Kimball off South Manitou Island, the Walrus near the Straits of Mackinac, and his most recent discovery, the Live Yankee. The schooner was wrecked in 1869 off High Island, part of the Beaver Island archipelago. In August 2022, Richardson and diver Mark Engelsman identified it; Coast Guard helicopter pilot Lieutenant Commander Matt Keiper had spied it from the sky a year prior.

Richardson says his interest began when he was just a youngster. “My older brothers would take their model ships and drop them in the pool,” he says. They would then swim to the bottom to look at them. “It must have stuck,” he says.

He raided libraries for books about such ships. But it wasn’t until the movie Titanic that he really embraced his inner shipwreck hunter. “I started researching. That led me to where I am now,” he says.

Richardson says he believes the public’s ongoing interest in shipwrecks just seems limitless. “The disasters, the storms, treasure and salvaging treasure. It’s also romantic,” he says.

And mysterious. Determining where a ship went down can involve research through various historical sources, and then determining how correct those sources were and whether the ships have since been moved by the action of the lake.

While the mystery fascinates Richardson and other shipwreck hunters, not every shipwreck merits a search. “I compare it to old barns. Not every old barn is historic and worth saving. With shipwrecks, it may not be worthwhile or profitable” to search for, he says.

Even the biggest watercraft can find themselves at the mercy of Lake Michigan, and as those 1,500 shipwrecks attest, the lake is not particularly merciful. Among the many shipwrecks near the coast of Leelanau County:

The Three Brothers
Located off the shore of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the schooner Three Brothers met its untimely end in 1911. Those hiking the Empire Bluff Trail may be able to catch a glimpse of the wreck.

Francisco Morazan
The freighter Francisco Morazan ran aground on the coast of South Manitou Island in 1960. The ship was stranded for several weeks before it finally broke apart and sank into Lake Michigan. “It’s the most intact above-water shipwreck in the Great Lakes,” Richardson says.

Francis H. Houghton, Walter L. Frost
Both sank off the shore of South Manitou Island. The former is a schooner that sank in 1887, while the latter was a steamer that sank in 1903. The two are among the most popular dive sites in the Great Lakes.

Jennie and Annie
This 1872 schooner was torn apart by a storm north of Empire. Numerous pieces of the wreck have washed ashore over the years.

Richardson notes that shipwrecks are like time capsules as many have been untouched for 50 or 100 years or more, and are well-preserved by the cold water – and there are still plenty more to be discovered.

“There’s probably at least a half-dozen to a dozen missing in the Manitou Passage still to be found,” he says. “The largest still missing in Lake Michigan is somewhere off North Manitou. The W.H. Gilcher was a freighter that went down in October 1892.” (pictured)

Multiple searches have thus far failed to find its remains. “It’s so far out, so remote. It was one of the first steel freighters,” says Richardson, who says the brittle steel used was to blame for the sinking of both the Gilcher and its sister ship the SS Western Reserve, which sank in Lake Superior two months before the Gilcher went to its watery grave.