In February, pieces of a century-old shipwreck began emerging from the sand at the northwest end of Ipswich’s Crane Beach—a jagged, 50-foot-long fragment of the starboard side of schooner’s wooden hull, the rudder, an anchor chain, a rusted galley stove so encrusted with sea life that it can be tricky to distinguish it from a shoreline rock.
The shipwreck arrived as a visitor from the past—believed to be the Ada K. Damon, which wrecked on Crane Beach on the Crane Estate in the furious Christmas blizzard of 1909. The reemerging schooner could also be seen as a Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, a visitor warning of the wreckage global warming portends.
Crane Beach is a property of The Trustees and at low tide last Saturday morning Crane Outdoor Guide Meghan Bowe led a group of some 15 people down to the property’s Steep Hill Beach as part of the conservation nonprofit’s regular “CraneExplorer: Shipwreck Scholars” tours of the wreckage. (The next tours are on April 6 and 15.)
The beach sits where the Parker, Rowley and Ipswich rivers converge and flow into the Atlantic Ocean. The sandscape is long and flat and chilly in the March ocean breeze. Bowe led the group to the galley stove, covered with barnacles, mussels and algae and sitting in a puddle a bit above the surf.
“Basically this is in it’s original resting place,” she explained. Scattered nearby in the sand and shallow pools were the rudder, various planks, and the rusty brown anchor chain that broke and doomed the ship. The side of the hull had come to rest in recent years farther down the beach. The anchor itself is probably somewhere across the river, still moored in the sand of Plum Island.
The Ada K. Damon was constructed in the Burnham shop in Essex in 1875. The 84-foot-long, two-masted schooner was based out of Gloucester, sailing out to Stellwagen Bank to catch cod and halibut for three decades. Later it was based out of Provincetown.
In 1909, a man by the name of A. K. Brewster sold his farm in York, Maine, and bought the ship. “He had a get-rich-quick scheme,” Bowe told the tour group. Construction was booming in Boston after major fires, so there was a great demand for sand to use in the manufacture of mortar and concrete. In late December 1909, Brewster and the five men of his crew sailed the boat out of Maine to extract sand from Plum Island to sell for Boston buildings.
But a gale blew up around 8 p.m. on Christmas night. The Boston Globe reported that the blizzard brought more than a foot of snow and 40-mile-an-hour winds as it continued into early the next evening. A 15.4-foot high tide, said to be the highest since April 1851, flooded piers and docks and streets in Boston. The five-masted coal-hauling schooner Davis Palmer wrecked off Winthrop with its entire crew of 12 men lost. Trains and trolleys shut down, trees and utility poles snapped, electricity went out. “Many towns still stormbound,” a Globe headline reported that Dec. 29.
Fleeing the gale, the Ada K. Damon “anchored between Plum Island and Steep Hill Beach. It was trying to hide from the storm in the lee of the beach,” says David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archeological Resources, which studies and protects shipwrecks, plane wrecks, submerged indigenous sites, wharves and the rest of the Commonwealth’s underwater cultural heritage. “They tried to ride it out, the anchor chain parted, and it was blown up on the beach. … This was not just a nor’ester, this was a huge storm that sunk 22 ships off the coast of Massachusetts. This was more a winter hurricane. It drove the Ada K. Damon way up on the beach.”
The crew all survived. “They got out and tried to pull it back into the water for three days,” Robinson says, but they couldn’t dislodge it from the sand, so the ship was declared a loss. “It ran aground on its first voyage as a sand schooner, and had not, as far as we know, taken on any sand.”
A 1911 photo in The Trustees’ archives shows people climbing and playing on the wreck during a public Crane Beach picnic. By then the masts had disappeared, but for decades the hull retained its form, even as it decayed. Over the years, tides and shifting sand would bury it and uncover it, creating a long cycle of disappearances and reemergences.
Today the rolling dunes above Steep Hill Beach end in sheer sand cliffs, like cross-sections revealing the roots of trees perched precariously along the collapsing edge. It’s a sign of “unprecedented erosion on that beach, more than seen in years,” explains Valerie Perini, regional education manager for The Trustees’ North Shore region and a marine biologist.
“There’s a net retreat in this section of the beach,” Robinson says. “That’s what led to it [Ada K. Damon] being more exposed.”
The severe beach erosion that has eaten away the dunes and uncovered the schooner in recent years is a harbinger of the future we’re facing. “These increased storms and erosion are likely tied to climate change,” Perini says. “These are two of the projected impacts NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] scientists are predicting and we’re already seeing.”
In September 2020, Hurricane Teddy arrived “much stronger than most hurricanes are that far up the coast,” Robinson says. Plum Island often gives Crane Beach some shelter from winter storms because such storms usually come from the north around here (that’s why they’re called nor’easters). But this storm blew out of the south. “The beach was just exposed to the full force of the ocean,” Robinson says. The storm coincided with two super high king tides at the full moon that flooded Steep Hill Beach with “enough water to basically refloat the hull.”
The sides of the hull, white oak planks and beams which had been held together by wooden nails made from black locust trees and iron fasteners, broke from the beam running the length of the bottom of the schooner where the keel would have been attached. “Wet sand was a great preservative for the wood, but not for the iron,” Robinson says.
The sides of the hull, resembling a ribcage, were splayed flat. Beams and planks broke off. The rising and falling tide floated big sections some 450 yards north and “individual timbers were scattered over 18 acres of beach,” Robinson says. “We’ve got wreckage that’s now traveled a quarter of a mile from where it started.”
“Most of it reburied,” Robinson said last week. “It’s only in the last month that this large section [of the starboard side of the hull] has reemerged.”
“It’s awful that this wonderful, intact bottom of this hull has come apart,” Robinson adds, but “it presents us unique opportunities to see parts of the hull that we haven’t seen in a hundred years.”
Plans for the Ada K. Damon’s construction were lost long ago, if there ever were any. Ships of this era were generally modeled as half hulls. From these small wooden models of one side of the ship, builders extrapolated full-sized patterns. When the 2020 damage to the vessel revealed more of the interior of the schooner, Robinson says they “saw marks in the bottom of the hull planking”—scratches the ship builders made to mark the ship’s center line and a roman numeral to indicate where a rib was to be installed in the hull.
“These schooners that were built in Essex didn’t stay the same over time. They developed, they evolved,” Robinson says. “They became sleeker and faster and eventually evolved into the hull design that we saw in early 20th century racers. … Speed was of the essence. They had to get their fish back to port as fast as possible. Whoever got back to port first got the highest price and it was fresher.”
The marks revealed in the Ada K. Damon whispered of how Essex schooners of the late 1800s were constructed. “This isn’t preserved anywhere else to this extent,” Robinson says. “These guys knew all that and how it was done. When they die all that knowledge goes with them.”
Wrecks like the Ada K. Damon also provide places for marine life to attach and hide, becoming home to blue mussels, barnacles, crabs, seaweed, snails “living on the seaweed and grazing microscopic algae and the green slime that has colonized the wreck,” Perini says.
“The large part of the hull is near the mouth of the Ipswich River at a jetty” of boulders,” Perini says, “but it’s moving every day.”
So another way of thinking about the Ada K. Damon is as an ongoing shipwreck, battered by the tides, continuing to break apart in a sort of slow motion. Perini notes the “fragility of the remains,” and implores visitors to “respect these archaeological artifacts, leave them where they are.”
“They’re elders and they should be treated that way with gentle respect,” Robinson says. “We refer to it as our old friend Ada and we never know if Ada is going to make more of an appearance or less of an appearance until we get out to the beach.”
“I think,” Perini says, “people really think of it as an old friend with secrets to share.”
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