For generations, a shipwreck half-buried on Sand Beach in Acadia National Park set visitors wondering: whose ship was it, and how did it end up here? In January 2024 a storm with 50 mph winds and 16-foot water levels tore it from the sandy berm, pounded it against the shore and carried most of it out to sea. The planks that survived now lie scattered along the beach — but archeologists and citizen scientists have pieced its story together.
What is left of the Tay on Sand Beach today. Photo by the National Park Service
The ship
The Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping — a yearly international list of trading vessels — first mentions the Tay in 1890:
| Type | wooden, one-decked, two-masted schooner |
| Built | 1887, by J. & R. McLeod, on the Black River, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Length | 93.7 ft |
| Measured tonnage | 133 tons |
| Flag and owner | British; registered to Peter McIntyre of St. John, New Brunswick |
A hard-working, storm-battered life
Old newspapers fill in the rest. The Tay carried lumber and coal between northeastern U.S. and Canadian ports, and storms dogged it.
| Date | What the papers reported |
|---|---|
| 1897 | Fall River Daily Herald: arrived "from St. Johns, with Lumber for A. Homer Skinner" |
| April 1898 | Philadelphia Inquirer: bound from Edgewater to St. John with coal |
| Nov. 30, 1898 | Indianapolis Journal, "Three Lives Lost": the British schooners Tay and Rondo "lost all their masts and are full of water" in a late-November storm |
| June 23, 1899 | repaired and back at work — a New Haven paper, the Daily Morning Journal and Courier, has it unloading lumber at a wharf |
| Aug. 6, 1900 | Philadelphia Inquirer: sailing with the Fraulein, carrying coal from Port Johnson to St. John |
| Sept. 15, 1903 | Philadelphia Inquirer, from Lubec, Maine: the Tay "failed to float at high water, and when the tide receded she was left on the beach" |
The wreck, July 1911
On July 29, 1911, a powerful gale forced Captain I. W. Scott to run the Tay ashore. "ONE MAN DROWNED, Schooner Tay is a Total Loss," read one newspaper headline. The man lost was Jasper B. Whelpley.
The Tay's wreckage after the gale drove it ashore. Photo by the National Park Service
The owner of Sand Beach, Eleanor Morgan Satterlee — J. P. Morgan's granddaughter — and her family helped rescue the crew and put them up in their summer home, and later set up a benefit fund for Whelpley's widow. Within days the wreck was a sight: the Bar Harbor Record announced "Three very good Photo postcards of the wreck of the schooner Tay at Sand Beach," on sale at the Rogers Pharmacy Co., one showing "the million shingles" strewn along the beach.
In 1949, Satterlee gave 100 acres of family land to the park, and the 300-yard Sand Beach became Acadia's only sandy beach.
Watching the wreck over the decades
| When | What photographs show |
|---|---|
| About 1950 | the wreck lying up near the grass line |
| 1960s | winter storms eroding the beach and exposing more of it |
| 1969 | a photo archeologists now use to compare with what the 2024 storm broke up |
| April 1972 | the hull lying parallel to the east–west shore, stern west, bow east — a position that points to a catastrophic wreck, not a ship deliberately abandoned |
The exposed wreck near the grass line of Sand Beach. Photo by the National Park Service
Winter storms exposed more of the wreck; this photo dates from 1969. Photo by the National Park Service
By 1972 the Tay lay parallel to the beach's east–west shoreline. Photo by the National Park Service
The 2024 storm
- First half: waves uncovered the Tay for the first time in decades, right where the old photos showed it. The stern, visible in 1972, was gone; only the midship section remained.
- Second half: the waves broke the exposed wreck apart in the surf and pushed the pieces east, where the heaviest timbers were found once the storm passed.
The Tay emerging from the sandy berm between waves of the January 2024 nor'easter. Photo by the National Park Service
The Tay in the water. Photo by the National Park Service
Tagging the Tay
The Shipwreck Tagging Archeological Management Program (STAMP) uses citizen science to document and monitor shipwrecks and loose ship timbers, in two phases: tagging and recording, with trained staff and volunteers.
Within weeks of the storm, the Park Service's Submerged Resources Center made STAMP tags and overnighted them to Acadia. In late January, park rangers measured and tagged the surviving timbers. That record keeps the Tay's story — and helps archeologists learn how wrecks break up and travel along a coast in ever more severe storms.
A STAMP volunteer measuring an exposed timber. Photo by the National Park Service
The Tay is not alone: with climate change, shipwrecks — federally protected cultural resources — are eroding out of many national parks' shores. Archeologists and citizen scientists working together can record them before it is too late.
Sources
Based on "Tracking the Schooner Tay," Acadia National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Newspaper quotations are from 1897–1911. The source dates the 2024 storm both January 9 and January 10, and gives the ship's width both as 27.7 ft and as a 12.1 ft beam, so neither figure is given here.
In these publicationsAcadia National Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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