Residents of Erieau, Ont., are used to little bits of wood washing up on their shore — but not one weighing around three or four tonnes.

“It’s about 30-some-odd feet long and about 15 feet wide, and it’s ripped and there was a bunch of old iron nails [poking] out of it and stuff,” said Jeff Vidler.

“That kind of told me it was that was part of some type of a wreck,” he told CBC Radio’s Windsor Morning.

The village sits on the shore of Lake Erie in Chatham-Kent. The great lake is a magnet for shipwrecks — it has more than 270 confirmed shipwrecks, and possibly thousands more hidden in its depths. So the village is used to seeing debris wash up on its shore.

But this giant fragment got residents talking, and when Vidler went to check it out, he knew he had to inform the experts.

“I’ve contacted … our province, the Coast Guard. I’ve emailed with the Great Lakes Maritime Museum [in Kingston, Ont.],” he said. “I’ve also talked to a gentleman out of the University of Michigan.”

Daniel Rose, the collections and programs co-ordinator at the Great Lakes Museum, was surprised by the photos Vidler sent him.

“A 35-foot piece of vessel showing up just on shore usually just doesn’t happen out of the blue. Usually, it follows after a shipwreck,” he told CBC Windsor.

“So to see a piece of that size, to me it was exciting because it spoke to what else could be hiding beneath the waters.”

A closer look at the wreckage that washed up on the shore of Erieau, Ont. (Jeff Vidler)

Potentially from a 19th century schooner

Rose says it’s “extremely rare” for such a large wooden piece to show up on a shore in 2024.

“I’d say about 50 years ago, you’d get more common shipwreck bits washing ashore just cause you are still closer to the age of sail,” he said.

“But nowadays, because there’s been 60 to 70 years of steel, coal and gas powered ships … the idea of a wooden ship fragment washing ashore really implies that it might have been under the water, buried under silt or some other kind of sediment by-product.”

Rose can’t say for certain what type of ship this fragment belonged to. His best guess is it belonged to a schooner — a ship primarily used for cargo, passengers and fishing — for a few reasons.

“First and foremost, it’s the size of the vessel,” he said. “You didn’t really get a lot of pleasure craft back in older times, so if there was a vessel of that size, it’d probably be a cargo ship.”

The structure of the fragment also speaks to it being for a bigger cargo ship, according to Rose, as the wood’s curve and the position of the ribs suggest it’s “part of a larger structure supporting the buoyancy of a ship of that size.”

A John Leavitt painting of the L.A. Dunton, a schooner vessel. (Martel)

The wreckage itself may also suggest it’s a schooner, as they were almost always “mom-and-pop-style”, family-operated cargo ships, Rose said.

“That means that when nasty weather comes up, it’s actually more common for these family-owned and operated vessels to not necessarily deal with the weather conditions as well as some of the larger vessels would today,” he said.

It’s unclear when exactly this vessel that washed up on Erieu was operated, but Rose hypothesizes that it sailed the lakes in the late 19th century, as ship manufacturers were moving toward sturdier steel hulls instead of wood around then.

This fragment may have been part of a 19th century schooner, a sailing vessel predominantly used to deliver cargo. (Submitted by Joan Pickering)

“You also saw a move from sailing ships to steam-powered ships,” he said. “When you have a have a boiler that’s burning coal, it made a lot more sense to have a steel ship than a wooden ship if in the event of … a stray ember pops out of the boiler, your [wooden] ship goes up in flames.”

“Because it’s a very structurally-sound-seeming large fragment of a ship [and] wooden, it makes sense to me that it would be probably a sailing ship rather than a steam-powered ship.”

Preserving the wreckage

Beyond its size, one of the most impressive features of this fragment is how well-preserved it is — especially for a piece that may be more than 100 years old.

Rose says its preservation has to do with Lake Erie’s freshwater content, which “actually retains its integrity quite a bit longer than it would” in other waters and even on land.

“In comparison to salt water, you don’t have the abrasive salt that’s going to be flowing through the wood, breaking the wood down over time,” he said.

“Ships that are wrecked and at the bottom of the Great Lakes are often in better health than ships that have been up and out of the water on land for that amount of time.”

Now that it’s on land, though, the wreckage is exposed to the “considerably harsher” air, which is a concern for Rose.

This ship fragment recently washed up on the shores of Erieau, Ont. It’s about 10.6 metres and weights as much as four tonnes. (Jeff Vidler)

“You’re now exposing it to all kinds of different contaminants that could start to degrade the wood, that could start to make it brittle … [and] decay,” he said.

“So as a conservation expert, you’d want to make sure that the piece is dry and also that you’re sealing the wood so that … it does stay in one piece and doesn’t start to fall in on itself.”

WATCH | #TheMoment 2 filmmakers discovered a 128-year-old shipwreck

Vidler says the wreckage is still sitting on the shore it washed up on. He’s not sure what will be done to it, but he says the province has been in touch with him.

“I did send them some information, pictures,” he said. “If they find that this is of interest, they will send an archaeologist from London that they have to come down and have a look at it.”