On a calm day in Green Bay, a Wisconsin father and his young daughter went out hoping to catch fish and instead hooked into history. Their family outing turned into the kind of story that makes every weekend angler secretly believe the fish finder might be hiding buried treasure.
What they spotted on the sonar was not a trophy walleye but the ghostly outline of a wooden hull, a vessel that went down during the chaos of the Peshtigo Fire and sat undisturbed for roughly 153 years. By the time they got back to shore, the pair had gone from casual fishers to accidental maritime historians.
The moment a fishing trip turned into a shipwreck hunt
I like to imagine the scene starting the way most family fishing trips do, with snacks, mild bickering about life jackets, and one parent quietly wondering if this was worth the gas money. Out on the water near Green Island in Lake Michigan, that routine shifted when the sonar screen lit up with long gray lines that looked suspiciously organized for a random pile of rocks. The father noticed what appeared to be the outline of a hull, and instead of shrugging and moving on, he circled back and took more scans, turning a lazy loop around the island into an impromptu survey of the lakebed that would later be shared as detailed sonar scans.
His daughter, just 4 years old, was the one who locked onto the image and treated it not as a glitch but as a discovery, the way only a preschooler with no sense of “this is probably nothing” can. While adults are busy explaining why things are unlikely, kids are busy pointing at the screen and declaring that the long gray lines are obviously a ship. That small act of insisting on wonder helped push the family from “huh, weird blip” to “we might have just found a 153-year-old wreck,” a leap that would eventually draw in maritime archaeologists and local historians.
From “Wow” to “152-year-old”: piecing together the George L. Newman
Once the images made their way to experts, the reaction was less “neat” and more “Wow,” and not just in the casual sense. Specialists studying the scans and the location near Green Bay quickly connected the dots to a lumber schooner believed to be the George L. Newman, a vessel that vanished during the inferno that swept across the region in 1871. The likely identification rests on the wreck’s size, shape, and position relative to the shipping routes that fed the booming timber trade, details that helped turn a family fish story into a serious lead on the fate of the George L. Newman…