NORTH BEND, Ore. – A massive wooden ship that disappeared on the southern Oregon coast decades ago is emerging from a sand dune eroded by wild winter storms.
On a remote beach of Coos Bay's North Spit, the seas are revealing the bow of a mystery ship.
Thirty feet of its thick, wooden bow protrudes from the dune. Forty feet wide at its broadest point, the hull sits dug into the dune, pointed toward the sea. Its iron supports are rusted and bent, its deck supports exposed, its portholes deep and square.
The ship was built from massive timbers and likely dates to the late 19th or early 20th century.
“We're pretty sure it is a lumber carrier built for the lumber industry in Coos Bay and bigger ports,” said Calum Stevenson, coastal coordinator for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation.
“We think it was built in North Bend at one of the larger shipping places and built from local wood, Douglas fir. We're thinking it's over 250 feet, and we know it has some interesting components not necessarily part of the construction, like the possibility of a bilge pump that may date it to the early 20th century.”
But a lot isn't known. What ship was it? How did it go down and when?
It's a lot to answer. And the sand is revealing its secret slowly.
Between 1852 and 1953, 58 ships wrecked in a span of about five miles off Coos Bay, said Vicki Wiese, collection manager at the Coos Historical and Maritime Museum. In those years, ships ran between Coos Bay and San Francisco carrying lumber, coal and other supplies.
“After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, ships from Coos Bay are what rebuilt California,” Stevenson said.
Guessing the ship's identity has become something of a favorite pastime around here.
“We get phones calls every hour,” Wiese said.
One popular guess is the Captain Lincoln, an Army transport ship that went down in 1851. Its crew made it to the beach and traded with the American Indians.
“It would be great to find that ship,” Stevenson said. “It was the ship that basically opened Coos Bay and brought in settlers.”
But it's definitely not the Captain Lincoln, he said.
Others suggested it may be the C.A. Smith, a ship built in North Bend by Kruse and Banks in 1917 that sank during a storm in December 1923, taking the lives of its crew.
Meanwhile, the newest coastal attraction is becoming a big headache. The mystery ship is about a mile south of the wreckage of the more famous New Carissa, which ran aground Feb. 4, 1999. The seas are high, and approaching the ship can be dangerous, Stevenson said.
Historians and researchers have five weeks to solve the mystery before beaches close March 15 for the snowy plover breeding season. They hope to use maritime records, personal memories and photographs to identify the ship. They may bring radar to more accurately pinpoint how far back into the dune the ship extends.
Even without the beach closure looming, they fear the ship will not last long.
“When preserved wood is re-exposed to the oxygen, it deteriorates much more rapidly than modern wood,” said Stephan Samuels, cultural resource specialist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “It is deteriorating even as we speak.”
Researchers also fear that, even though it is against the law to disturb historical artifacts, people will try to take parts of it home, hastening the deterioration of what is already a piece of Oregon history.
