A maritime expert planned to visit a Nantucket beach Monday to inspect weathered wooden beams exposed by the weekend’s powerful nor’easter, possibly the remnants of a 19th-century shipwreck buried beneath the island’s southern shore.
The Egan Maritime Institute said its exhibits and collections manager would survey the site and send a report to state underwater archaeologists, who then will work with the institute to determine which vessel the wreckage came from.
The splintered timbers, fastened together by rusted iron, emerged near an area where remains believed to be from the Warren Sawyer, a wooden schooner lost in 1884, have been found before.
Officials from Egan, a nonprofit that operates the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, cautioned Monday that the newly exposed wreckage has not been identified with certainty.
The slow-moving nor’easter battered the Northeast coastline over the weekend with heavy rain, strong winds and dangerous surf, flooding low-lying communities from New Jersey to New England and knocking out power to more than 100,000 customers at times Sunday.
Multiple boats were washed ashore in Massachusetts, and the storm also raised concerns about coastal erosion as waves crashed into beaches and seawalls.
Jason Graziadei/Nantucket Current via AP 
The Warren Sawyer ran aground on Dec. 22, 1884, while carrying 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston, according to the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources. Its captain and seven-member crew were ultimately rescued.
The schooner remained intact on the island’s Miacomet Beach for two weeks, allowing islanders to save 700 bales of cotton using skids and teams of oxen. Then, on Jan. 6, 1885, another storm tore the ship apart, scattering pieces of its hull, remaining cargo and cordage across more than half a mile of beach.
More than a century later, remains believed to be from the ship have continued to emerge from the sand.
Jason Graziadei, who has lived on the island for two decades and is editor of the online news site the Nantucket Current, said he went out to the beach Saturday amid heavy winds with his 8-year-old son after he got a tip about possible wreckage on the island’s south shore.
He and his son found the wooden beams on a drive-on beach by the town’s wastewater facility that everyone calls the “Sewer Beds.” He said they had to park their car and walk down to the beach because erosion from the storm had formed a steep drop-off.
The location made the discovery even more remarkable to him: It was directly beneath a route beachgoers had been driving all summer.
“Given where it was and where it emerged, it means that everyone who was driving onto the beach this summer was just directly over this,” Graziadei said. “I just think it is so funny and so cool.”
The Nantucket Current posted video online of the shipwreck on the beach, showing waves crashing against the wooden beams.
Graziadei said his son was excited by the discovery and began asking what had happened to the people aboard the ship and why it had run aground. The two could walk right up to the exposed wreckage.
“It’s amazing to think from, you know, over 100 years old that it’s still there,” Graziadei said.
State archaeologists inspected a roughly 42-foot section of hull exposed on Miacomet Beach in late 2022 and concluded it was likely part of the Warren Sawyer. A roughly 15-foot-square section of the lower stern appeared nearby in February 2023, but shifting sands buried it again before state archaeologists could return to document it.
“Graveyards of the Atlantic”
Nantucket is one of the areas known as the “graveyards of the Atlantic,” with more than 750 wrecks estimated in the surrounding waters. Last September, a dive team identified a shipwreck off the coast of Nantucket as a World War I-era fishing boat that sank nearly 100 years ago with more than 20 men aboard.Â
The institute urged visitors not to disturb the newly exposed wreckage. Massachusetts law prohibits removing, damaging or displacing underwater archaeological resources.
According to the Nantucket Current, the Inquirer and Mirror newspaper published this account of the Warren Sawyer shipwreck in 1945:
“Patrolman Eugene Clisby sighted the schooner’s lights of Miacomet Rip and hastened to the station to ‘call all hands.’ The surf was raging, completely enveloping the craft with only the swaying masts visible in the blackness of the night. Capt. Veeder shot a line over the jib-stay, putting it this far forward to avoid hitting anyone on board. But the sailors were too numbed with the cold to attempt going forward to secure it. Finally patrolman Williams, during a smooth sea, rushed down the beach and with a hand-line swung a line over her bow. The sailors made their way across the sea-washed decks and secured the line. A hawser was made fast and a breeches buoy rigged.
“With the schooner lurching under the impact of the seas, it was a difficult task to keep a steady strain on the hawser, but the experienced life savers worked unceasingly and with the coming of the morning of the 23rd, all hands had been safely landed on the beach.”
