Crew digging in Florida’s oldest city stumbles upon a centuries-old shipwreck. See it
Caked in mud and oyster shells, the pieces of wood sticking out of a Florida construction site might have not looked like much at first. But when archaeologists got to digging, they realized they were on top of a piece of history dating back two centuries.
A construction crew was working on a drainage improvement project in St. Augustine, which is Florida’s oldest city, in early October when workers unearthed a wooden shipwreck, archaeologists said.
The Florida Department of Transportation said it was an “amazing discovery” in an Oct. 12 announcement about the ship.
SEARCH Inc., an archaeology organization, handled the excavation with the Florida Department of Transportation. SEARCH archaeologists dated the shipwreck to the mid- to late-1800s, officials said in an Oct. 13 news release.
“We believe the vessel may have sunk unexpectedly and, over time, was silted in,” FDOT District 2 Secretary Greg Evans said in the release. “That is why it was preserved so well – it was encapsulated in soil and mud, so there was no air contact for it to decay. It’s truly an incredible find.”
The construction site turned into an archaeological site as experts stepped in to excavate the ship. They sprayed it with water to maintain its condition and remove layers of mud and shells that preserved it for centuries.
“Every find, including artifacts such as broken bottles, shoes and wood fragments from the vessel, were mapped, cataloged and bagged with water for further laboratory analysis by SEARCH archaeologists,” officials said in the release.
James Delgado, senior vice president at SEARCH, said the team believes the ship was a “small single-masted, shallow-draft sailing craft of the 19th century” used for fishing in nearby waterways and the ocean.
Archaeologists say the ship was likely abandoned on what was once a shoreline in the 19th century.
Officials brought in SEARCH before the project had even begun due to the long history of St. Augustine. Founded in 1565, the northeast Florida city, along with being the state’s oldest, is the longest continually inhabited European-founded city in the continental U.S.
“We assume that it was used by some sort of individual or maybe a small family, that’s a little hard to tell,” FDOT archaeologist Ian Pawn told WSVN. “We do have some artifacts found with it. We’ve got some shoes, some leather shoes. The other thing is that I believe there are some coins from the 1860s and 1880s.”
Archaeologists deconstructed the boat piece by piece, removing planks of water-soaked timber and palm log pilings. They transported the planks on a plywood “stretcher” out of the site to be placed in water storage for later analysis.
FDOT announced that the ship had been extracted about a week after it was first discovered.
“With a dedicated team, including support from the local community and the on-site construction team, we were able to extract the vessel in order to allow the important work on the community’s infrastructure to continue,” Delgado said.
This story was originally published October 13, 2023 at 2:53 PM with the headline "Crew digging in Florida’s oldest city stumbles upon a centuries-old shipwreck. See it."