Tracking the Schooner Tay

The Schooner Tay’s wreckage as it appears now on Sandy Beach in Acadia National Park. NPS photo.

A beached shipwreck on Sand Beach in Acadia National Park was a staple of the landscape that shaped the imaginations of visitors of all ages. They could explore along the beach, wondering: Where did it come from? Whose ship was it, and why did it end up on here? If the ship’s wooden planks could talk, what stories would they tell?

On January 10, 2024, a strong storm bearing 50mph winds and 16-foot water levels eroded this ship from its resting place in the sandy berm and beat the wreck against the shore until most of it washed out to sea. Now the surviving planks lie scattered along the shoreline of Sand Beach—but their story is far less jumbled, thanks to the assistance of both archeologists and citizen scientists.

The Schooner Tay (1887-1911)

The first mention of the Schooner Tay appears in Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping, published in 1890. Lloyd’s Register is an international logbook of maritime vessels engaging in trade for a given year. The list describes Tay as a wooden, one-decked, two-masted schooner that was built by J. & R. McLeod in 1887 on the Black River in New Brunswick, Canada. The vessel was 93.7 ft. in length and 27.7 ft. in width with a beam of 12.1 ft. Tay’s measured carrying capacity, or tonnage, was 133 tons, but the gross tonnage—its total interior volume—was 116­­–125 tons. The British-flagged vessel was registered to Peter McIntyre of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada.

Antique newspapers supplement the historical evidence found in Lloyd’s Register. Tay avoided the newspapers during its early life and is only mentioned in 1897 by The Fall River Daily Herald as having arrived from “St. Johns, with Lumber for A. Homer Skinner.” A few months later, in April 1898, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Tay was en route from “Edgewater to St. John N.B. with coal. on private terms.”

On November 30, 1898, the Indianapolis Journal illustrates a threat that will become no stranger to the Tay—storms. Entitled “Three Lives Lost,” the newspaper article mentions many ships wrecked in the late November storm, including the “British Schooners Tay and Rondo, both of which: lost all their masts and are full of water.” Yet repairs set the ship back in motion within months. By June 23, 1899, the Daily Morning Journal and Courier from New Haven, Connecticut report the Tay as “discharging lumber at one of the wharves near Barnesville Bridge.” Within a year, the Tay was accompanying the Fraulein laden with a load of coal from “Port Johnson to St. John N.B,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, August 6, 1900.

On September 15, 1903, the Philadelphia Inquirer published news heard from Lubec, Maine that the Tay “failed to float at high water, and when the tide receded she was left on the beach.”

Despite this misfortune, throughout the first decade of the 1900s, the Tay continued in the lumber and coal industry, servicing northeastern American and Canadian ports. However, powerful storms again plagued the Tay’s travels. On July 29, 1911, a powerful gale from the southwest forced Captain I.W. Scott to beach the vessel at Grand Head.

The Middleford Daily Journal featured the disaster in a large headline: “ONE MAN DROWNED, Schooner Tay is a Total Loss. DURING A GALE, Two-master Got into the Breakers, AND WENT ASHORE ON BEACH, Lumber-Laden Craft Met Her Fate in Southeaster.”

The wreck of the Schooner Tay created an impressive spectacle for visitors. Days after the incident, the Bar Harbor Record announced, “Three very good Photo postcards of the wreck of the schooner Tay at Sand Beach are on sale at the Rogers Pharmacy Co.” It elaborated, “two of them taken [are] taken quite close and the other showing the million shingles strew along the beach.”

The wreckage of the Tay after a powerful gale from the southwest forced it ashore. NPS photo.

Remarkably, the owner of Sand Beach, J.P. Morgan’s granddaughter, Eleanor Morgan Satterlee, and her family assisted with saving Tay’s crew and temporarily housed them in their summer home. The Satterlee family later set up a benefit fund for the widow of Jasper B. Whelpley who died in the wrecking event.

In 1949, Eleanor Morgan Satterlee donated 100 acres of the family’s land to Acadia National Park, and the 300-yard-long Sand Beach became the only sandy beach in the park.

The Tay’s exposed wreckage lying near the grass line of Sand Beach. NPS photo.

The next images of the Tay did not enter the historical record until around 1950, at which point the wreckage lied near the high-up grass line of the sandy beach. By the 1960s, winter storms consistently eroded Sand Beach and further exposed the Tay.

The increased exposure of the Tay’s wreckage due to winter storms. NPS photo.

From the above photograph dated to 1969, National Park Service nautical archeologists can identify aspects of the wreckage and compare them to what the January 9, 2024 storm broke up and redeposited on the beach.

By 1972, the Tay lied parallel to Sandy Beach’s east-west oriented coast line. NPS photo.

Photos from April 1972 show the Tay lying parallel to the east-west oriented coastline with its stern to the west and the bow facing east. Its position suggests a catastrophic abandonment shipwrecking process rather than a purposeful abandonment.

The Schooner Tay eroded out of the sandy berm in between waves of the nor’easter on January 10, 2024. NPS photo.

Wave action during the first half of the January 2024 storm re-exposed the Tay for the first time in decades. The vessel was in the same location revealed in historic photographs. Interestingly, however, the stern structure, visible in the April 1972 photos, is absent in 2024, and only the midship portion remains.

The Schooner Tay in the water. NPS photo.

The waves broke up the Tay schooner as the second half of the storm began.The second half of the storm battered the exposed wreck in the surf zone. As the wreck broke apart, the waves pushed pieces of the vessel to the east where the heaviest timbers were found after the storm subsided.

The ship built in 1887 by J. & R. McLeod on the Black River is no longer intact, but it still has many fragments of history to share. Its harrowing tale is far from unique—this is not the first time a federally protected cultural resource eroded from a national park’s shoreline. Due to the growing effects of climate change, shipwrecks are eroding out of many national parks, though the combined work of archeologists and citizen scientists can protect these sites before it is too late.

Tagging the Tay

The Shipwreck Tagging Archeological Management Program (STAMP) is a public engagement program focused on documenting and monitoring shipwreck sites and disarticulated shipwreck timbers, utilizing citizen science to better document and understand these historic features. STAMP projects consist of two distinct execution phases: tagging and recording. During the tagging phase, trained staff and volunteers participate in documenting shipwreck remains.

In the weeks after the January 2024 storm, the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center (SRC) created STAMP tags and overnighted them to Acadia National Park. In late January, Acadia Park Rangers measured and tagged the remaining structural elements. Their efforts preserve the storm-plagued story of the Tay and its crew now help archaeologists tell the story of how shipwrecks break up and travel along the coast during increasingly severe weather systems.

A STAMP volunteer measuring the length of an exposed timber. NPS photo.