Just a quick update to our previous blog entry on the Mickler’s Landing Wreck, which had become re-exposed on the beach a few days before the start of the new year. We had lots of great media attention from this wreck, and while I was out of the country attending the Society for Historical Archaeology meetings in frigid Quebec City, another news story on the wreck came out in the Jacksonville paper.
From the Florida Times-Union:
More remnants from Northeast Florida’s nautical past have revealed themselves on Ponte Vedra Beach.
But while experts think they know when the wreck occurred, what ship it was is still a mystery.
St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum archaeologists waded into the waves last week to look at 80 feet of iron and timbers revealed during a New Year’s low tide near Mickler’s Landing. It appears to be a schooner from the 1860s into very early 1900s. It apparently met a tragic end during a 1947 storm if a fuzzy photograph of a two-masted ship beaching there proves to be this wreck, Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program chief archaeologist Chuck Meide said.
“A schooner most certainly could have an iron frame and wooden planking,” Meide said. “It does have some iron plating on its bow, and that is a little strange. We haven’t seen any ship construction like that.”
Shipwrecks have been cropping up along Ponte Vedra’s coastline, including this one investigated by Meide’s crew when a bit of it surfaced in 2008. The program investigated a 19th-century sailing vessel uncovered in 2001 by Tropical Storm Gabrielle off Ponte Vedra Boulevard south of Solana Road. Another wreck surfaced in mid-October at the Guana preserve, apparently a 1940s-to-’60s shrimp boat.
Be sure to check out the entire article at the Times-Union!