(Photo courtesy of Brendon Baillod) The hulk of the Mediator, (foreground) a wooden schooner, derelict in shallow water near the MTU heating plant, with a modern steamer, the Toniesta, around 1910. Brenden Baillod and his team of underwater archaeological researchers, positively identified the ship, which has been falsely identified as a passenger vessel “Sailor Boy,” and as the “Morgan.”

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a series of the identification of the schooner barge “Mediator,” which sank in the Keweenaw Waterway in approximately 1900.

The remains of one of the earliest cargo vessels to sail on Lake Superior has been identified, even though it has lain on the bottom of the Keweenaw Waterway since around the turn of the 20th century.

Brendon Baillod, a Great Lakes maritime historian, researcher and archivist based in Wisconsin, along with his dive team, identified several wrecks in the waterway in the 1990s, among them was a schooner barge named the Mediator. With Baillod in the 1990s Keweenaw Waterway dives, were Randy Beebe, Dan Fountain and Kurt Fosburg.

Baillod is the president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association, a director-at-large of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History, and a founder of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Foundation & Ghost Ships Festival, and has worked with the Daily Mining Gazette on more than one of his projects, to offer public information on the ships and significance of Great Lakes maritime history. Baillod contacted the Gazette on Tuesday morning, with the following story:

“This paper tells the story of one of the Keweenaw’s least-known wrecks, which we identified,” Baillod said, “the historic schooner Mediator, which may be one of the earliest schooners on Lake Superior.

Baillod wrote that in the spring of 1995, he and Beebe set out to examine an old derelict wreck that was shown on NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration) charts of the Keweenaw Waterway, just off the Michigan Technological University’s power plant.

“At least one book identified the wreck as that of the steamer Sailor Boy,” Baillod wrote, “but we had also heard from area divers that the wreck was that of the ‘J.P. Morgan.'”

The Morgan was quickly ruled out for a number of reasons, chief of which is that there is no record of a ship by that name having sank in the Keweenaw Waterway, described by Baillod as a “massive steel steamer.”

Records identify the Morgan as a 601-foot-long steel hulled propeller-driven, Great Lakes freighter constructed by the Chicago Shipbuilding Company of Chicago, Illinois, in 1906. Renamed the Heron Bay in 1966, the ship was scrapped at Lauzon, Quebec, in 1979. Baillod did, however, mention a small wooden steamer, also named Morgan, lying just west of the wooden vessel he and his team were attempting to identify.

The Sailor Boy was one of three excursion vessels to burn on the waterway. Under very suspicious circumstances, Sailor Boy was a wooden passenger steamer destroyed by fire on May 12, 1923, but sank about 30 feet from shore, 100 yards east of Osceola Point, on the Hancock side of the lake, some two miles west of the wooden wreck being researched by Baillod and his team. In fact, stated Baillod, the wooden vessel they had approached was so near the surface, his boat nearly struck it pulling up to it.

“The bow of the wreck was sticking nearly out of the water and appeared extremely weathered,” Baillod said. “We puzzled at the identity of the old wooden ship below us as we suited up, clipped our tools to our vests, and tumbled into the canal.”