EDITORIAL: Home from the Sea

The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987 was necessary federal legislation.

Shipwrecks in public waters, and especially in the Great Lakes, were being plundered and damaged by treasure hunting divers. The law made that illegal by declaring that shipwrecks on a state’s “submerged lands” are the state’s property and subject to the state laws protecting the sunken ships. An estimated 3,000 historic wrecks in the affected waters were given the protection they needed from further molestation.

An ironic aspect of the Abandoned Shipwrecks law is that if it had been in effect a decade or two before it was signed by President Ronald Reagan, the pieces that make up what some marine historians consider the most significant collection of historic freshwater shipwreck artifacts ever assembled would be moldering on the bottom of Lake Michigan instead of being cared for and presented for public edification in a much respected maritime museum.

That collection is a trove of some 10,000 artifacts dating to the 19th and early 20th centuries that was donated to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum by the Klopp family of Port Washington. The priceless gift was memorialized last week by the removal of a shipwrecked trading schooner’s massive rudder, windlass and anchor from the yard of the Klopp home on Division Street for transport to the museum in Manitowoc.

Allen “Butch” Klopp found the artifacts—heavy ships’ equipment and parts like those displayed in his yard, navigational instruments, firearms, mundane household items, delicate pieces of silverware and china—in the ruins of vessels he explored on the floor of Lake Michigan. After retiring as a Port Washington police officer at a young age following a diagnosis of a disease that would prove fatal years later, he pursued a personal quest to recover seafaring relics.

Seemingly fearless in his descents to the lake bottom, sometimes in dangerous conditions, using basic scuba gear—without the benefit of the special breathing gases and advanced equipment used by today’s technical divers—he dove to numerous shipwrecks off the Wisconsin shore and beyond, including the Straits of Mackinac.

The eclectic historical objects he brought to the surface before the law rightly put them off limits to divers were a form of treasure, but not one that would enrich its collector. Klopp just accumulated his findings. He would display a few pieces here and there and for a while he and a partner operated a small private maritime museum in a fish shanty on the west slip peninsula of the Port Washington harbor, but basically he was a custodian for the detritus of the deep he harvested. The collection grew, stored at his Port home and in a storage building near Plymouth, where it remained for years under a patina of dust and cobwebs.

Now the Klopp collection, in its perfect new home in the custody of a leading maritime museum that has the wherewithal to safeguard, catalog, curate and display it, belongs to everyone as tangible history of the waterborne transportation system that contributed significantly to America’s prodigious 19th-century economic growth spurt.

The collection tells of the Lake Michigan age of sail, roughly a century starting in the early 1800s, a time when the settlement and prosperity of the Great Lakes region were driven by the sailors and sailing ships that moved building materials, goods and people as though the lake were a liquid freeway.

Lake Michigan is a popular attraction for recreational boaters in the 21st century, yet is likely that the lake had more traffic in the mid-19th century than it does today. Cargo-carrying sailboats plied its waters by the hundreds year round. Most were two- or three-masted schooners, in many cases wide, unwieldy boats with shallow drafts and dubious seaworthiness. Sailing them, especially in winter, was brutal, perilous work, to which the Klopp collection gives testimony.

The coast where Port Washington and Ozaukee County were settled has particular significance in the history of the lake’s age of sail, for schooners carrying their cargos between Chicago and Milwaukee and northern ports passed in great numbers and many now litter the lake bottom off our shore.

The importance of this graveyard of ships was recognized last year when National Oceanic and  Atmospheric Administration established the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary for the Lake Michigan waters off Ozaukee, Sheboygan and Manitowoc counties, where more than 100 vessels are believed to have sunk and 39 of their wrecks have been discovered.

A Port Washington diver’s astonishing collection of artifacts of those ships is now exactly where it belongs—in a Wisconsin museum in that national sanctuary.

Why does it belong there? Cathy Green, executive director of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, gave the answer when she said of the Klopp collection, “There’s nothing like this anywhere in the world.”