A mother and her son got an unexpected look at Midwestern history earlier this month while spending a day at the beach near South Range, Wisconsin.
Hannah Damon, director of outreach and administration at Camp Amnicon Adventures and Retreats, was with her 9-year-old son along the camp’s Lake Superior shoreline when unusually clear water let them see straight down to the remains of a shipwreck she had heard about for years but never actually seen.
“We started seeing beams and cables and this massive pipe, and it was like, wait a minute, this is a shipwreck, this is a shipwreck,” Damon told Fox News Digital.
The wreck belongs to the A.H. Pitz, a roughly 70-foot steam-powered tugboat built in 1923 for the McMullen and Pitz Construction Company of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and named for Armond Pitz, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society. The tugboat changed hands several times before it was abandoned at the mouth of the Amnicon River in 1951. Damon said she had heard it was intentionally sunk that year to help stabilize a sandbar along the beach.
Excited by the sighting, Damon hurried to grab her camera. “I ran back to shore and I got my camera, and I was like, OK, you are not allowed to splash me, this is a really exciting discovery,” she recalled telling her son.
Video she recorded shows weathered wooden beams and other debris resting on the lakebed beneath glassy, clear water.
That kind of visibility is unusual for the area, which sits within the Lake Superior clay plain. The clay-heavy soil along that stretch of shoreline typically keeps the water murky and the wreck hidden from view. Damon said that was true again just a day after her discovery.
“I was actually just down back at the beach yesterday, and again, the water was calm, but it was murky again,” she said. “I hope it’s one of those things that, every once in a while, if you know where to look, you’ll be able to find it. But it’s definitely a rare find. It’s really exciting.”
Damon has swum and spent time at the beach for roughly a decade, and said this was the first time she had ever actually spotted the wreck. “It was really exciting to find it, to come across it, and I just couldn’t wait to share it with the world,” she said.
After she posted the footage on social media, people began sharing their own memories of the tugboat, with some recalling having seen it as far back as 1967. Damon described the reaction as close to a local viral moment. “It was probably the closest thing to ‘viral’ the Camp Amnicon has ever experienced,” she said.
Damon said the response has brought together people with a shared connection to the area’s history. “I think that’s the cool thing about archaeology and history and local culture, that this kind of stuff can bring us together,” she said.
