A tip sent to a local newspaper during a weekend storm led to the rediscovery of wooden ship remains on a Nantucket beach, exposing timbers that archaeologists believe may belong to a schooner wrecked in 1884. The remnants surfaced as heavy winds and seas battered the Massachusetts island on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, and were photographed in the days that followed.
The discovery began with a reader rather than a researcher. Jason Graziadei, editor-in-chief of the Nantucket Current, was covering the Nor'easter when he received a message from island resident David DeHart, who reported that he had found what he believed to be a shipwreck uncovered by the storm. Graziadei went to look himself, bringing his son Owen along. "I drove out there with my son Owen and sure enough, it was right there where David said it was," he told NPR by email.
DeHart's find was on a south shore beach known as Point of Breakers, where the shoreline takes the full force of Atlantic weather. According to the Current, wooden timbers were newly visible jutting out of the sand in the unmistakable shape of a hull, framed by waves breaking over the site. The remains appeared in the same general area where fragments of a vessel had turned up in 2022, suggesting that repeated storm erosion has been stripping sand away from a wreck that had been buried for more than a century.
That earlier round of finds set in motion the work that connects the timbers to a specific vessel. David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist for the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, inspected the 2022 discoveries and spent several months researching them alongside the Egan Maritime Institute and the Nantucket Historical Association. His conclusion was that the remnants most likely belonged to a schooner named the Warren Sawyer — though the identification is expressed as a probability rather than a certainty.
Robinson described the difficulty of that determination when he spoke to the Current in 2023. As with most historical archaeological work, he said, researchers had to piece together the available literature, archival records, photographic material and physical evidence collected at the site in order to reach a conclusion about whether the wreckage came from the Warren Sawyer. The phrasing reflects standard practice in underwater archaeology: a match is built from corroborating details, not a single artifact.
The Warren Sawyer was a cargo vessel that left New Orleans bound for Boston carrying bales of cotton and scrap iron. It went ashore in a storm on the night of Dec. 22, 1884, more than 140 years ago. The identification would place the newly exposed timbers in the same general era and along a stretch of coast notorious for ship losses, and would give researchers a documented wreck against which to compare timbers, fasteners and other structural elements still buried in the sand.
Nantucket's geography makes finds like this likely to recur. The island sits in the open Atlantic, its south shore directly exposed to northerly and northeasterly storms, and it has a long maritime history as a port with a substantial merchant fleet. Storms that drive sand off the beach can uncover structural remains, and the same process that reveals a hull can also bury it again, or scatter it. Archaeologists generally treat each exposure window as a brief research opportunity.
The 2026 rediscovery also illustrates how much of this work depends on locals. Formal identification took months of archival and archaeological effort in 2022 and 2023, but the renewed visibility of the timbers came from a resident who noticed them and a newspaper editor who drove out to verify the report in the middle of a storm. Without that chain of attention — observer, reporter, site visit — the remains might have been photographed by passing visitors and re-covered by the next high tide cycle.
Robinson's careful wording matters. The Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources has not issued a final, conclusive determination tying the Point of Breakers timbers to the Warren Sawyer; the working conclusion rests on the accumulating body of evidence assembled for the site. Continued exposure of the remains would give researchers additional material — hull planking, fasteners, cargo traces — with which to test that conclusion.
For now, the visible result is a hull-shaped outline of heavy wooden timbers in the sand at Point of Breakers, battered by surf and photographed by Graziadei for the Nantucket Current. The Warren Sawyer's 1884 voyage from New Orleans to Boston ended on this beach, and if Robinson's identification holds, the latest Nor'easter has uncovered the clearest look yet at where it happened.
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