Oregon Coast Shipwrecks
The shipwreck at Siletz Bay.
The remains to be seen ...
... and some that are buried, too. Two shipwrecks that still haunt the central coast
Story by Niki Price. Contributed photos (Excl. Boiler Bay, at bottom)
Related: The Wreck of the Emily Reed, in Rockaway Beach
Do you prefer your shipwrecks well-documented and photographed, so that you may pore over every fatal error and imagine the scene in vivid detail? Or do you like a good mystery, a relic of unknown age, name and origin, lying silently and patiently beneath the sands of time?
In north Lincoln County, we’ve got one of each. In Boiler Bay, just north of Depoe Bay, low tides reveal the remains of the J. Marhoffer, a steam schooner that came aground there in 1910. Siletz Bay, in south Lincoln City, is home to the remains of what might, or might not, be the 1860 brig Blanco. We’ll start with the obvious, and leave the vague for later.
J. Marhoffer
Some people who visit Boiler Bay State Park, or drive past the cove during a winter storm, might assume it was named for the roiling action of the ocean. Early in the history of Lincoln County, locals called it “Brigg’s Landing,” after one of the pioneering families here. For the past century, however, it’s been known to all as the home of the boiler, what’s left of the J. Marhoffer.
The 175-foot schooner was one of the small freighters that by the early 20th century were making regular trips off the Pacific Coast. On May 18, the Marhoffer was bound for Portland under the command of Captain Gustave Peterson. The crew members’ accounts say that she was doing about 9 knots, pushed north by a tailwind off Yaquina Head.
The first engineer, they said, was taking a nap when the second engineer tried to light a new gas torch, an invention he had never used before. He lost control of the flame, which quickly spread throughout the oily engine room and down to the steamer. The engine continued to turn, burning so hot that none of the crew could get close enough to try and flood it. Captain Peterson gave the order to abandon ship, altering his course for the rocky shore three miles east. Peterson’s wife, the ship’s dog and half the crew were dispatched to a lifeboat that headed for shore. The captain and the rest of the crew followed in the second lifeboat a few minutes later.
... and some that are buried, too. Two shipwrecks that still haunt the central coast
Story by Niki Price. Contributed photos (Excl. Boiler Bay, at bottom)
Related: The Wreck of the Emily Reed, in Rockaway Beach
Do you prefer your shipwrecks well-documented and photographed, so that you may pore over every fatal error and imagine the scene in vivid detail? Or do you like a good mystery, a relic of unknown age, name and origin, lying silently and patiently beneath the sands of time?
In north Lincoln County, we’ve got one of each. In Boiler Bay, just north of Depoe Bay, low tides reveal the remains of the J. Marhoffer, a steam schooner that came aground there in 1910. Siletz Bay, in south Lincoln City, is home to the remains of what might, or might not, be the 1860 brig Blanco. We’ll start with the obvious, and leave the vague for later.
J. Marhoffer
Some people who visit Boiler Bay State Park, or drive past the cove during a winter storm, might assume it was named for the roiling action of the ocean. Early in the history of Lincoln County, locals called it “Brigg’s Landing,” after one of the pioneering families here. For the past century, however, it’s been known to all as the home of the boiler, what’s left of the J. Marhoffer.
The 175-foot schooner was one of the small freighters that by the early 20th century were making regular trips off the Pacific Coast. On May 18, the Marhoffer was bound for Portland under the command of Captain Gustave Peterson. The crew members’ accounts say that she was doing about 9 knots, pushed north by a tailwind off Yaquina Head.
The first engineer, they said, was taking a nap when the second engineer tried to light a new gas torch, an invention he had never used before. He lost control of the flame, which quickly spread throughout the oily engine room and down to the steamer. The engine continued to turn, burning so hot that none of the crew could get close enough to try and flood it. Captain Peterson gave the order to abandon ship, altering his course for the rocky shore three miles east. Peterson’s wife, the ship’s dog and half the crew were dispatched to a lifeboat that headed for shore. The captain and the rest of the crew followed in the second lifeboat a few minutes later.
The burning ship was easy to see from Depoe Bay, and by the time it came ashore there were people waiting anxiously onshore. Tony Wisniewski, a long-lived Depoe Bay resident who was a boy in 1910, described the landing like this:
“I could see a small speck drift astern of here, and I figured it was the lifeboat with her people. Then she came charging in belching flames, sparks and smoke like a volcano,” Wisniewski told Stan Allyn, who later related the tale in his 1982 memoir, “Heave To! You’ll Drown Yourselves!”
“She piled onto the rocks with a helluva crunching crash, heeled way over to starboard, then lay there burning like a blast furnace. All of a sudden her tanks exploded and shot timbers, chunks of steel and flame clear up into the trees behind me, a quarter of a mile away,” Wisniewski told Allyn.
Tony’s mother, Mrs. Andrew Wisniewski, saw the wreck from her home in Lincoln Beach, about two miles north. Seeing the lifeboats headed for the mouth of Fogarty Creek, she took off her red sweater and waved it frantically. She was hoping, she told her son later, to signal a safe place to land. The crew on the lifeboat, however, thought the red flag meant danger. They turned around and rowed three miles south to Whale Cove, where they landed safely on the beach. The only fatality was the ship’s cook, who was severely burned. The rest of the crew and passengers, 19 in all, made it safely to shore.
Nearly a century later, low tides in the former Briggs Landing reveal a rusty boiler, about 12 feet in diameter, with two large “eyes” looking south toward the cliff-top Boiler Bay State Park. You can see it from the park at low tide.
During extreme low tide events, you can walk down to it from a rough trail off Hwy. 101, just north of the park entrance. The small pullout, with room for about three cars, is marked by a rusty iron pipe, mounted upright in the bluff, that probably came from the Marhoffer, too.
Brig Creek?
One of the defining features of Lincoln City is Schooner Creek, which empties into the north end of Siletz Bay near SW 51st Street. It was so-named because, until about 15 years ago, the ribs and wreckage of a 100-foot-long ship protruded through the sands at the creek’s mouth.
No one is sure of the boat’s name or origin. The most solid historical evidence comes from the correspondence of Ben Simpson, who worked for the Indian agency in Siletz. In 1864, he wrote the following to H.H. Luce of Coos Bay: “A large brig named Blanco, from San Francisco, was wrecked a few days hence at the mouth of the Siletz River. I have just returned from an examination of the vessel. She is a total wreck; her masts are gone, her deck broken in, her hull is split from deck to keel, and I fear her crew are all lost.” Simpson goes on to detail the items he salvaged, and those he found in the possession of Indians.
In 1949, writer Ben Hur Lampman found another citation on the fate of the Blanco, from the “Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties,” published in 1898. It states that the brig was made in North Bend, by a member of the well-known Simpson shipping family, in 1860. This source confirms that the Blanco drifted into Siletz Bay, bottom side up, in 1864, and was a complete loss.
But the brig Blanco is not the only candidate. Other ships lost in the area include the schooner Sunbeam, which disappeared in the 1880s, and the 113-ton schooner Uncle John, lost off Cape Foulweather in 1876. Or, perhaps it is the schooner Phoebe Fay, which stranded north of Cape Foulweather in 1883.
It’s been difficult to do anything but wonder. Siletz Bay gets sandier every year, and no one has seen this skeleton, schooner or not, for a long time. But it hasn’t been forgotten; in fact, in 2004 Lincoln City Visitor and Convention Bureau director Sandy Pfaff asked Beaverton physicist and imaging specialist Bradley Matson to attempt to locate the wreck.
Matson and his colleague Gerald Sandness used historic photos of the wreck to narrow down the search location. They made a geophysical map of the area using global positioning system coordinates, so that they could precisely identify the area’s landmarks. Then, in the spring of 2005, they attached four magnetometers to a wheeled cart (dubbed The Beachcomber 1) and made a checkerboard survey of the area: north to south, and east to west. He released his findings to the LCVCB in 2008.
“The idea was, simply, to look for anomalies in the magnetic field. These are very subtle changes, and it was our hope that we would find subtle changes in the shape of a ship,” Matson said. “We found something I’ll call it an anomaly in roughly the same orientation and size of what is pictured in historic photographs. It’s in the right place, the right size the right shape. But that’s not very conclusive.”
The only way to confirm that these readings, blue and magenta dots on hist computer screen’s field of green, would be to start digging. But that will have to wait for an archeological survey, which isn’t on any scientist’s priority list. For now, this shipwreck must remain shrouded in mystery.
“Preservation is the most important thing. This is a site of historic and archeological significance, and it’s illegal to disturb it,” Matson said.
TODAY photo of the Boiler Bay boiler, from the J. Marhoffer.
