Wooden remnants likely from an 1884 Nantucket shipwreck washed ashore during a weekend nor'easter that knocked out power for more than 131,000 Americans.
Fragments of what eagle-eyed observers believe may be the three-masted schooner Warren Sawyer turned up on the south shore of Nantucket, Massachusetts, as the storm battered the island with wind and rain. The find has not been formally confirmed, but local reporting ties the debris to the vessel that wrecked near Miacomet Beach more than a century ago.
Daily Mail reporting described wooden remains left on the beach after the nor'easter arrived Friday and continued through the weekend. Nantucket Current flagged the discovery in a social post that quickly drew attention to the island's buried maritime past.
The outlet wrote that the storm "has uncovered the remains of a shipwreck along the island’s south shore" and said the fragment "is likely from the 19th century schooner Warren Sawyer, a wooden ship that wrecked near Miacomet Beach on December 22, 1884."
"The nor’easter lashing Nantucket with wind and rain this weekend has uncovered the remains of a shipwreck along the island’s south shore. The fragment is likely from the 19th century schooner Warren Sawyer, a wooden ship that wrecked near Miacomet Beach on December 22, 1884."
That assessment matches the known history of the ship. The Warren Sawyer was sailing from New Orleans to Boston with a cargo of cotton and scrap iron when gale-force winds blew her off course. She went down around 11 p.m. on the night of December 22, 1884.
A 1945 account in The Inquirer and Mirror captured the darkness and the danger. The paper described the scene "with only the swaying masts visible in the blackness of the night."
Local residents assigned to a nearby lifesaving station got a line over the bow and hauled the men to shore. The work was hard and continuous.
"With the schooner lurching under the impact of the seas, it was a difficult task to keep a steady strain on the hawser, but the experienced life savers worked unceasingly and with the coming of the morning of the 23rd, all hands had been safely landed on the beach."
All eight men made it. The crew list preserved in that same account named Captain Edwin L. Saunders of Boston; mate Andrew F. Coffin of Addison, Maine; and seamen Thomas Coleman and Alexander McLeod of Boston, John O'Daniel and George Sibley of London, Daniel J. Kane of Yonkers, New York, and Antone Swazey of New Bedford.
No one died that night. Ordinary men on a cold beach did the job and brought every sailor home.
This is not the first time the Warren Sawyer has surfaced. On February 9, 2023, Nantucket resident Jesse Ahern came across wooden beams and a portion of a ship's stern while walking her dog. The spot sat about 300 yards west of where the vessel is thought to have wrecked.
She contacted officials. Analysis confirmed those earlier fragments belonged to the long-lost schooner. The newest debris washed up in the same stretch of south-shore sand, which is why observers again pointed to the Warren Sawyer even before any fresh lab work is complete.
The latest pieces remain only "likely" or "believed" to be from the 1884 wreck. Confirmation will require the same careful review that settled the 2023 find.
While Nantucket yielded a historical surprise, the nor'easter punished a much larger stretch of the East Coast. A Saturday night full moon helped drive higher waves. In Scituate, Massachusetts, surf crashed over homes and slammed a seawall. Floodwaters reached dangerous levels in Edgewater, New Jersey. The Tri-State area took some of the hardest hits.
PowerOutage data showed more than 131,000 Americans without electricity as of early Sunday morning. Connecticut had just under 30,000 homes dark. New York counted about 26,000. Virginia stood near 18,000, Massachusetts about 15,000. Maine, Michigan, and Pennsylvania each reported roughly 5,000. New Jersey had about 3,000.
Wind gusts reached 60 mph, and more outages were expected. Forecast rainfall ran three to six inches for New Yorkers, two to six inches across northern New Jersey and the lower Hudson Valley, and four to six inches on Cape Cod, Rhode Island, and eastern Connecticut.
Air travel buckled. More than 2,000 flights were delayed and over 430 canceled on Saturday. Organizers scrubbed the Global Citizen Festival and the All Things Go Festival in the New York area. One man was killed by a falling tree. Another person remained missing.
The same system that knocked out power and canceled festivals also dragged old timber back onto Nantucket sand.
Nearly 142 years separate the original wreck from the newest debris. The ship was wooden, three-masted, and ordinary for its day. The men who saved her crew were local and trained for exactly that work. Their success still reads clean in the 1945 newspaper record.
Modern storms do not care about schedules, festivals, or flight boards. They do, however, keep uncovering what earlier generations left behind. Nantucket's south shore has now produced Warren Sawyer material more than once. Officials confirmed the 2023 pieces. The newest fragments await the same scrutiny.
Until then, the island holds another reminder that the Atlantic does not forget, and neither should the people who live beside it.
Strong communities still meet hard weather the old way: clear eyes, steady hands, and no excuses when the water rises.
