From the archives: Montauk hikers find remains of old ship

This story was originally published in Newsday on March 25, 1999

Members of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society were out hiking in Montauk last week for the fresh air and the exercise. They weren't expecting a maritime history lesson.

But while walking along the dunes by the shore, they encountered the timbers of an old vessel protruding from the sand. The wooden frames and attached planking measured about 25 feet by 12 feet and appear to be from a craft constructed in the late 18th or early 19th Century, according to historians.

"It was very exciting to find," said society member Ray Hartjen of Springs. "It has a bunch of treenails, which are wooden pegs used to fasten planks to the ribs , showing. At the edge of one plank you could see what looked like bronze rods running through it from one side of the boat to the other."

Hartjen, a retired educational researcher, began calling maritime historians. Two experts from the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation examined the timbers Tuesday.

"It could be a fairly early 19th-Century vessel," said Bill Peterson, senior curator at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. To pin down the era of construction, "you have to go by construction techniques and the historical record to see what vessels may have wrecked at that point. It's in an area where there were a lot of wrecks over the last 200 or 300 years, so identifying which one it is might be difficult." He said the wreck is probably too recent to use carbon dating.

Henry Moeller, a professor of marine science from Dowling College, thinks the hulk could be the barge Cuba that was wrecked off Montauk in 1889.

Hartjen's research leads him to think it might be the schooner Lizzie M. Dean wrecked in 1886, the coal-carrying schooner Alvina Campbell destroyed in 1887, the sloop Black Eagle from Greenport, wrecked in 1893, or the Spanish schooner Lizera, which sank in 1823.

None of the experts Hartjen contacted expressed interest in trying to extricate the hulk for preservation and display. "It's something you would want to document for sure, but it's a lot of time and money to preserve something like that," Peterson said.

Henry Keatts, a professor and shipwreck expert at Suffolk Community College, said there were thousands of shipwrecks along the shoreline of Long Island over the centuries. But he added that "it's quite unusual to have one that was completely covered come out of the dunes." Remnants of a ship would end up in the dunes because of migration of the sand. "If a wreck drove ashore hard," he said, "sand can build up around it."