The Door County Maritime Museum lists more than 270 shipwrecks surrounding the peninsula and nearby islands, but most took place a century ago.
That is, said museum director Kevin Osgood, if you don’t count the pleasure boats that strike Dunlap Reef near the shipyard in Sturgeon Bay.
The last major shipwreck on Lake Michigan took place in fog and snow in November of 1960, when the Liberian freighter Francisco Morazan ran over the wreck of another freighter, the Walter Frost. Most of the ship still is visible above the waterline where it grounded off of South Manitou Island in Michigan waters, according to the National Park Service.
Two years earlier near Gull Island, halfway between Door County and the Straits of Mackinac, the 41-year-old, 639-foot-long SS Carl Bradley got caught in a storm with waves estimated at 45 to 60 feet in height.
“It split in two and sank, losing all hands with the exception of two survivors,” Osgood said of the November 1958 wreck, which claimed 33 lives.
An official U.S. Coast Guard investigation summarized that the hull broke in two due to “hogging” stress (arching at the top of waves), and that the captain used poor judgment when he departed from the shelter of the Wisconsin shore near Cana Island. The commandant of the Coast Guard issued a conflicting report that the ship broke up due to a structural or metallurgical defect.
Door County residents raised funds for families of the lost crew members at the annual marine ball in 1959, according to a Jan. 13, 1959, Door County Advocate news report.
Few major shipwrecks have occurred since 1940, the year of the Nov. 11 Armistice Day Blizzard that sank two freighters near Pentwater, Michigan.
