It started as just another evening for Matt Olson, a Wisconsin tour operator with a penchant for exploration. Sitting at his computer in mid-July 2025, Olson was scanning satellite photos of Lake Michigan, searching for new and interesting sights for customers of his business, Door County Adventure Rafting. But as he panned over the shallow waters of Rowleys Bay, near the tip of Door County’s long peninsula, something odd caught his eye: a strange, bloblike discoloration in the water. Olson didn’t know it yet, but he had just stumbled onto a piece of history that had been lost for nearly 140 years—the wreck of the Frank D. Barker.
According to NBC News, Olson’s chance discovery was more than a personal thrill. It set off a chain of events that would bring together state historians, maritime archaeologists, and even Olson’s own young son. As Olson later told reporters, “To think that my 6-year-old son had his first time ever snorkeling on a shipwreck, and being one of the first people to see this wreck after more than 130 years—that’s pretty exciting.”
Door County, perched between Green Bay and Lake Michigan, is no stranger to shipwrecks. Its waters are littered with more than 250 known wrecks, a testament to the region’s often treacherous sailing conditions. But each new find, experts say, helps fill in the gaps of the region’s maritime history, offering fresh clues about how people and goods moved across the Great Lakes over the centuries.
The Frank D. Barker was no ordinary vessel. Built in 1867 by veteran shipbuilder Simon G. Johnson of Clayton, New York, the 137-foot wooden “canaller” was designed specifically for the Great Lakes. As Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archaeologist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, explained to NPR, canallers were “built to sail through the Welland Canal, a series of locks and both natural and modified waterways that enabled ships to bypass Niagara Falls.” The Frank D. Barker’s job was to haul grain from Milwaukee and Chicago east to Lake Ontario, and, on the return trip, bring coal from Lake Erie to fuel the rising industries and homes of the Midwest.
But in 1887, disaster struck. The ship, traveling from Manistee, Michigan, to Escanaba to pick up iron ore, ran into bad weather and thick fog. Disoriented, the captain and crew veered off course and ran aground on a limestone outcropping at Spider Island. Over the next year, five separate salvage attempts—one in October 1887, and others in June, August, September, and October of 1888—tried and failed to free the ship. Finally, the Frank D. Barker was abandoned, its loss valued at $8,000 at the time—more than $250,000 in today’s dollars, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
For decades, the Barker’s fate was a footnote in local lore—until Olson’s satellite sleuthing brought it back into the spotlight. Once he reported the find, the State Historic Preservation Office launched an investigation. Thomsen and her colleagues at the Wisconsin Historical Society dove into archives, poring over old newspaper clippings, insurance documents, and port enrollment records. They also conducted diving missions to examine the wreck firsthand. What they found was astonishing: the entire ship was there, “spread out on the bottom, almost like pieces of a puzzle that you could assemble in your mind and put back together,” Thomsen told NBC News.
The Frank D. Barker is just one of a flurry of recent discoveries in the Great Lakes. On September 8, 2025, NPR reported that another long-lost vessel, the SS James Carruthers, had been found in Lake Huron. These finds are part of a record-breaking trend: more shipwrecks are being discovered in North America’s giant freshwater lakes than ever before. “Oh, my goodness, it’s been accelerating,” Thomsen said in her NPR interview. “We have a lot more shipwrecks that are being discovered every single year. I’ve worked this job for 22 years, and it used to be that we would have one or two, maybe three on a good year that was reported. But in our record years, we’ve had 17, 18, 25 shipwrecks reported, and it’s a struggle to keep up.”
What’s behind this surge in discoveries? Several factors, according to Thomsen. First, there’s increased public awareness and interest, fueled by press coverage and outreach by state and federal agencies. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, has established three federally designated sanctuaries in recent years, shining a spotlight on these underwater time capsules.
But technology has played an equally crucial role. “It used to be that fish finders just could see the bottom, and they didn’t have the capability of side scanning. And now, almost every boat or—that you get will have some sort of side scan sonar ability on it and the ability to recognize submerged structure on the bottom,” Thomsen explained to NPR. Even recreational fishermen are now reporting wrecks they spot with their upgraded gear.
There’s another, less expected factor: invasive species. Zebra and quagga mussels, while a headache for boaters and ecologists, have dramatically improved water clarity in the Great Lakes. Where visibility once topped out at 10 feet, it’s now common to see 100 feet or more, making it much easier to spot wrecks from above or while paddling over shallows.
Climate change, too, has left its mark. More intense and frequent storms batter the Wisconsin coastline, stirring up sand and exposing previously hidden shipwrecks. “We see a lot of sand movement, especially here along the Wisconsin coastline. And so that exposes shipwrecks that are buried on our beaches or in shallow water as these giant waves come and crash and wash out the sand,” Thomsen noted.
Each discovery is more than just a curiosity; it’s a window into the past. “Each one of these shipwrecks is really a time capsule,” Thomsen said. “They represent this point in time when a ship went down. It may have been carrying a particular cargo. It tells us about shipboard life—what the crew would have carried with them and what went down with the ship. And in some cases, these are burial sites.” In Wisconsin, shipwrecks are protected under the law from looting and damage, and sometimes even under burial laws if lives were lost.
But beyond the statistics and the science, there’s a human element to every wreck. “They sometimes have the most interesting and rich histories,” Thomsen reflected. “It may be the scene of a disaster, and—on face value. You see when it went down and what it was carrying and if there was a human life lost. But it’s the little stories that are associated with it.”
As for Olson, the thrill of discovery was matched only by the chance to share it with his son—a reminder that history isn’t just about the past. Sometimes, it’s about the adventures that bring it back to life, one shipwreck at a time.
