Heavy wind and surf battered the Massachusetts island of Nantucket over the weekend of September 26, 2026, and with the storm came an unexpected sight: the wooden ribs of a ship, jutting from the sand in the unmistakable shape of a hull. The newly exposed remains on a south shore beach may be those of a schooner lost there more than a century and a half ago, in 1884.
The discovery was not made by archaeologists digging along a marked site, but by a resident who thought the worst of the storm might have revealed something. David DeHart noticed the change along the shoreline and sent a tip to the *Nantucket Current*, the island's local newspaper, where he knew someone was covering the Nor'easter. Jason Graziadei, the paper's editor-in-chief, was on the story and drove out to the spot with his son, Owen. Graziadei confirmed that the timbers were right where DeHart had said they would be, exposed by the surge of water and sand the storm had moved across the beach.
The location is Point of Breakers, a south shore beach known for the volume of water it takes during a nor'easter. The remains appear in the same stretch of sand where fragments of planking and timber were found in 2022 — a detail that suggests the 2026 exposure is not a scattering of unrelated debris but a reappearance of a known site, uncovered, buried again, and now uncovered a second time.
That earlier find set in motion the work that connects the timbers to a specific vessel. After the 2022 discovery, David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist for the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources, inspected the finds. He then spent several months working through the evidence alongside researchers at the Egan Maritime Institute and the Nantucket Historical Association, drawing on archival records, historic photographs, earlier reports and the physical remains themselves.
Robinson's conclusion, published by the *Current* in 2023, was that the wreckage most likely came from the tern, or sailing vessel, the *Warren Sawyer*. He was careful in his framing, noting that as with most historical archaeological research, the effort to reach a conclusive determination means piecing together the literature, archival, photographic and archaeological evidence assembled for a site, and weighing whether that record supports a final identification rather than a provisional one.
The *Warren Sawyer* was a cargo vessel that made regular coastal runs, and on the night of December 22, 1884, it went ashore carrying a cargo of bales of cotton and scrap iron. The two commodities describe a working coastal freighter of the mid-19th century, one whose loss would have been an economic blow to its owners and a hazard to shipping routes that ran past Nantucket's exposed southern shore.
Weather events like the one that exposed the remains are a recurring feature of the island's shoreline. Nor'easters — storms named for the northeasterly winds that drive them — arrive with heavy seas that strip sand from beaches and cut back bluffs and dunes, and each cycle of removal and deposition can change what lies at or near the surface. Shipwreck sites on dynamic coasts often surface, disappear and resurface over decades, which is why archaeologists treat a single storm's exposure as the beginning of a documentation effort rather than the end of a discovery.
The vulnerability is the urgent part. Once timbers that have been buried in wet, oxygen-poor sand are exposed to air, salt and wave action, they begin to decay rapidly, and the hull shape visible in the first hours or days after a storm can be largely gone within a season. The reappearance also creates a familiar risk: visitors and well-meaning diggers can damage a fragile site, remove artifacts from context, or even disturb remains of people aboard.
For Nantucket, a place whose identity is closely tied to shipping, shipbuilding and the sea, the timing carries added significance. A vessel that ran aground on the island's south shore in 1884 belongs to an era when such losses were common and often went unrecorded beyond a line in a local ledger. Modern identification — a newspaper tip, a state archaeologist, a maritime museum and a historical association working together — offers a level of documentation that earlier generations did not have.
The story also highlights the role of local journalism in the process. The tip passed from a resident to a newspaper, and the paper's own 2023 reporting on Robinson's findings is part of the public record that anchors the identification. Graziadei said he was covering the storm when the message arrived, and it happened to be the paper's reporter on the ground.
For now, the identification remains probable rather than final. The description of the remains as those of the *Warren Sawyer* carries a visible qualifier, and researchers would need to return to the site to document the newly exposed structure, compare features with the 2022 finds and the archival record, and build the conclusive case that Robinson described as the goal of historical wreck research.
What is not in doubt is the sequence of events: a resident spotted the remains, the storm uncovered them, and islanders once again became the first to see a piece of their maritime history rise out of the sand. Whether the walls of the *Warren Sawyer* hold up through the coming winter's weather — and through another round of excavation and study — will determine how much of the story can still be told.
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