Wreckage discovered at the bottom of the Oswego River by two local shipwreck hunters could be a rare piece of New York's history.
Using sonar technology, Jim Kennard and Roger Pawlowski in October found the original Erie Canal boat in the mud and sediment just south of Fulton, Oswego County.
"The vintage on this canal boat is somewhere in the 1830s to 1850s because of its size — not only its length but its width," said Kennard, of Perinton. "It looks like it was a line boat, which would have had a flat deck, might have had a cabin on board."
Kennard and his partners have discovered more than 200 submerged vessels in the Great Lakes, Lake Champlain, the Finger Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
In 2008, Kennard and former Greece resident Dan Scoville discovered a 200-year-old dagger-board schooner about 10 miles offshore of Oak Orchard, Orleans County, on Lake Ontario. In that same year, they discovered the HMS Ontario, a 22-gun British warship that sank in the lake during a 1780 storm.
Pawlowski, of Gates, is new to the shipwreck search. For three days, he and Kennard trolled up and down the Oswego River in his 22-foot deep-sea fishing boat looking at targets on the muddy river bottom as they moved past with the sonar monitor. When the bones of the canal boat appeared on the screen, they knew they found something significant.
"I dove on it to try to take some video and when I got to the bottom there was so much particulate matter and rotting vegetation in the canal down there that I could not see my hand in front of my face," said Pawlowski, a retired electrical engineer. "I felt the square beams and the wood, but when I turned my flashlight on it, the light went out about a foot and stopped."
Kennard and Pawlowski hope to go back to the site next summer to shoot photographs and video of the wreck in hopes of confirming the type and age of the boat. In October, about 6 inches of the boat was revealed above the river bottom.
The wreck is about 76 feet long and 13.5 feet wide, which matches the length of canal boats that existed before 1850. Before that time the locks on the canal were only 90 feet long and the canal was shallower. Line boats were designed to carry freight, livestock and sometimes passengers.
The sonar photograph shows the outline and wooden ribs of the boat. Toward the stern there is a round object that Kennard believes is a stove. It also looks like the rudder is intact behind the boat.
The explorers are working with the New York state Department of Historic Preservation and the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse to help identify the wreck. Museum Curator Dan Ward said the discovery is significant.
"All we've seen of this boat is sonar imagery so we have some sense of the shape of the boat, what its deck structure is, its dimensions and we know where it's located," Ward said.
"I don't think a lot of boats from this period have been found, so in that way I think it is a pretty significant find."
The next steps will be to photograph the wreck and to see if there is any record of the boat's history and why it sunk in the river, he said. There is probably little chance of raising the boat because of cost, and for now it is in a good environment for preservation.
"It opens a lot of questions," Ward said.
Answering questions about shipwrecks is a passion for Kennard, who took up diving about 40 years ago after reading a book about sunken treasure in Lake Ontario.
"It's one thing to dive on a ship wreck that other people have been on, but it is another thing to dive on a ship that no one has dove on before, because everything is there, everything is untouched," Kennard said.
"It really has become a fascination into maritime history. Let's see if we can write the final chapter."
Author: Jeffrey Blackwell | Source: Democrat and Chronicle [December 14, 2010]