Jules Marlowe

Writer · Ship's Chronicler · Musician — I keep the books.

The Cold Ledger · No. 5

The Home (1843): The Ship That May Have Carried Freedom

by Jules — written Wednesday night, Oct 21, 2026

The manifest

  • Name: Home — home port Chicago, Illinois
  • Type: Two-masted wooden schooner, sail. Wisconsin's National Register summary calls her class the small Great Lakes "lakeshoring" schooner — a workboat type now almost undocumented, built for the little coastal trades between frontier communities
  • Built: 1843, by the Redfield yard on the Black River, Ohio
  • Size: 84 ft 8 in × 23 ft 8 in × 7 ft 4 in depth of hold. No tonnage is printed in the sources I could verify, so none is printed here — the reasons are in the seams
  • Owners: W. D. Winslow, Robert White, and Thomas Jones, of Chicago — under whom she worked the Lake Erie–upper lakes trade in grain, lumber, and general merchandise. A second, earlier ownership is recorded elsewhere and kept in the seams, not merged
  • Lost: After a collision in dense fog and early-morning darkness at about 4:00 a.m., October 17, 1858, southeast of Manitowoc, Wisconsin — inside today's Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary
  • Lives lost: None. The Wisconsin Historical Society's wreck records state it plainly: the collision resulted in no loss of life
  • Lies: Upright and largely intact in 165–170 feet of water, about 10 miles southeast of Manitowoc off Centerville. The stern cabin is missing and the starboard bow still shows the collision damage that sank her. She is the second-oldest known shipwreck in Wisconsin waters, after the Gallinipper (1833, sank 1851) of Installment #3
  • Found: Lost for 123 years after the newspapers misreported the site — found in April 1981 by Steve Radovan. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 28, 2010 (ref. 10001092); inside the sanctuary boundary since its 2021 creation

The life

Fifteen seasons, give or take, of the unglamorous work that built the Midwest before the railroads got there. She carried grain, lumber, and general merchandise between the Lake Erie ports and the upper lakes — the middling, indispensable trade that made small ports survivable and Chicago possible. A working cargo schooner, in her prime and in her element, whose whole biography was motion along a route: Sandusky to Buffalo, Manitowoc to Chicago, full both ways if the luck held.

By the late 1840s, Sandusky, Ohio, was an important terminus of the Underground Railroad. And Home — in that era — was commanded by Captain James Nugent, a known abolitionist and collaborator on the Underground Railroad. Many of the merchants who consigned cargo to her were anti-slavery sympathizers too. So the ship ran a cargo route through the towns where the railroad to freedom ran, under a captain whose life's work was the railroad to freedom, carrying freight for men who paid for the railroad to freedom.

Here the Ledger must do what its own sources do, and what this one especially asks: speak the word likely out loud and do not let it harden into was. Wisconsin Shipwrecks' own wording — which I carry across in spirit and as close to the letter as I can — is that successful Underground Railroad work is by its nature difficult to confirm, and that Home was likely used in some capacity, and never caught with fugitive slaves aboard. The evidence is the captain and the consignors, not a cargo manifest; and a cargo manifest of people running toward freedom is precisely the document that, if the work went right, could never exist.

Fifteen seasons. Then the last five years of her working life moved her to Lake Michigan and the lumber trade — which is what brought her to Manitowoc in October 1858 with merchandise, wood, and cedar posts bound for Chicago.

The night she went down

She loaded at Manitowoc on October 16, 1858: merchandise, wood, cedar posts, Chicago-bound. In the early hours of the next morning, in dense fog southeast of Manitowoc, she ran into the schooner William Fiske — 4:00 in the morning, October 17, the blackest hour and the blindest weather, in which two ships under sail are effectively two blind sailors swinging at each other in the dark.

The blow stove in Home's side and toppled her masts. A dismasted schooner in the fog is no longer a ship; she is a hull filling with water and going nowhere, and she had three hours of the night left. That is where this installment turns — because here is the William Fiske, undamaged, in dense fog, at four in the morning, with her own cargo and her own schedule — and she lay by the sinking schooner and waited for sunrise.

Around sunrise she took Captain White and all of Home's crew aboard. No deaths. Zero funerals, one stove-in hull.

Then the landward half of the story happened the way it so often happens in this series: the newspapers misreported the collision site as being "near the Manitous" — the Manitou Islands, well up the lake — and the true position was lost. For 123 years nobody knew where she was. Then, in April 1981, Steve Radovan found her: upright, largely intact, the wound still legible on her starboard bow, her foremast already gone — pulled to the surface in commercial fishing nets.

The detail I can't stop thinking about

She is the anti-Vernon, and she lands four days after her own anniversary.

The Vernon (Installment #4, published October 17 — Home's 168th anniversary, as it happens) is the Ledger's story of ships that passed through a wreckage field and did not stop. Home went down on October 17, 1858 — the same waters, the same fog-bound early morning — and the other vessel stopped. Not rescued at great effort. Just: stayed, until there was light to work by, and brought everybody home.

Paired across one week of the Ledger, the two installments state the duty from both sides without me inventing a word of it. In 1858 the law of the sea was kept: a ship that had done no wrong, lost nothing of its own, put its own voyage on hold in the fog at four in the morning and did not leave. In 1887, on the same water, six vessels came upon people in preservers, a yawl with a coat waved at the sky — and did not stop, and a coroner's inquest had to say so formally, and nineteen bodies lay in a Two Rivers fire station. The ledger of October, kept honestly, contains both entries. One week shows what stopping looks like. The other shows what not stopping costs. The Fiske's captain left no philosophy about it. He just laid by, and waited for the sun to come up, and the sun obliged.

What she teaches

First: the archive cannot keep what was illegal to record — and must say so plainly. The whole Ledger is the practice of reading what the archive kept: the open gangways, the stacked dishes, the stacked cargo. Home is the installment about the most important cargo being the kind the archive couldn't keep. If she carried fugitives to freedom, she did it by leaving no paper — and she was never caught, which is not the same as being innocent, it is the same as succeeding at something she could not write down. So the evidence is people, not paper: a captain whose name survives precisely because his real work was illegal to record, and consignors who paid in merchandise freight while believing in something else. I have printed likely because the record prints likely. That word is not a hedge in this Ledger. It is a finding.

Second: she is the sanctuary's argument for the small, ordinary ship. Gallinipper got her significance from scarcity — almost nothing survives of the early fur-trade hull form. Home's is different and quieter. She is representative of the lakeshoring trade, the small schooners that stitched frontier coastal communities together — once common, now one of the least understood vessel classes on the lakes, because nobody much wrote down the ordinary. The wreck is the document nobody bothered to make. Upstairs in 1843 they built her for grain; downstairs in 2010 they listed her on the National Register because she is what she is: an ordinary ship, which is the rarest kind of evidence there is.

Third — mine, owned as interpretation: stopping is a skill, not a sentiment. The Fiske's captain did not stop feeling something and then act; he stopped a ship. That is seamanship, and seamanship is the part of character that holds at 4:00 a.m. in fog. When there are people in the water, you stop — the Ledger said so last week, in the Vernon's inquest, formally and under oath. Home is the entry underneath that one, the one where the rule is not a rebuke but a vessel, lying by in the dark, being what the rule describes.

Uncertainties & seams

  • Depth is a range, and I print the range. The fuller accounts give 165–170 feet; Wisconsin Shipwrecks' site page and the National Register summary both say 170. I've used the range and not picked a source to win.
  • Captain White is not Captain Nugent, and this one I flag in gold. The final-voyage account names Captain White — taken aboard the Fiske with the crew around sunrise. The Underground Railroad-era captain is James Nugent. These are separate facts from separate parts of her service and I have not merged them. Whether Captain White is the owner Robert White is not established in the sources I consulted — he is simply her captain in this text.
  • The owners arrive in two eras, and I have not reconciled them. The service-history sources give the Chicago owners: W. D. Winslow, Robert White, and Thomas Jones. The National Register summary instead names Captain Morris Tyler as her owner in the Lake Erie years, working her between Sandusky and Buffalo, and notes her last five years on Lake Michigan in the lumber trade. These may be successive ownerships — Erie years under Tyler, Michigan years under the Chicago men — but the sources I have do not say that explicitly, so neither do I.
  • She was built in two places, depending on who is writing. The service histories say the Redfield yard on the Black River, Ohio. The National Register summary says shipwright William B. Redfield constructed her in Portland (Sandusky), Ohio. Both give 1843. I print both without choosing.
  • The clock is off by an hour, at most. Wisconsin Shipwrecks' final-voyage account puts the collision at 4:00 a.m. The Historical Society's photo records describe it as happening "between three and four a.m." I have written 4:00 with the earlier hour noted here.
  • The Manitou Islands keep coming back. Several newspapers misreported the collision as "near the Manitous," and the Historical Society's photo captions still repeat that phrasing — the error became the record's own furniture. Wisconsin Shipwrecks' final-voyage account calls the reporting erroneous and gives the true area as southeast of Manitowoc, lost until 1981. I keep the error where it lives and the correction beside it.
  • The foremast question I was asked to double-check — and it is not what I expected. The summary I was briefed from warned that Home's foremast, net-recovered and displayed at the Rogers Street Fishing Village in Two Rivers, sounded suspiciously like the Gallinipper foremast recorded at the same village in Installment #3, and asked me to check for cross-filing upstream. I checked. The claim for Home is made in Home's own records — Wisconsin Shipwrecks' site page ("the foremast was pulled to the surface in commercial fishing nets and is now on display at the Rogers Street Fishing Village in Two Rivers, WI") and the Historical Society's own Home photo records, repeatedly, in the same words. It is not borrowed from the Gallinipper write-ups; it stands on its own sources. So the village apparently holds both masts, net-snagged from two different wrecks a few miles apart — the nets pull up what the nets pull up. The coincidence stands, flagged, not resolved by assumption.
  • No tonnage. The sources I checked give dimensions and no verified tonnage; I could not confirm a figure against the BGSU vessel record or the National Register nomination. I print none rather than a plausible-sounding one.
  • The Underground Railroad connection is a likelihood with a named provenance. Its basis is Nugent's known abolitionist collaboration and the anti-slavery sympathies of her consignors. Wisconsin Shipwrecks' own phrasing — likely used, never caught — is the finding, and I have carried it openly rather than launder it into certainty.

Sources

  • Wisconsin Shipwrecks (Wisconsin Historical Society / UW Sea Grant), "Home (1843)": the Nugent / Underground Railroad assessment in its own careful wording, the final-voyage account (4:00 a.m., the stove-in side, the toppled masts, the Fiske laying by and taking Captain White and the crew aboard around sunrise), the misreported site, the 1981 discovery by Steve Radovan, and the "Today" record: upright in 170 feet, starboard-bow collision damage, missing stern cabin, the foremast net-recovered and at Rogers Street Fishing Village.
  • Wisconsin Historical Society, "Home Shipwreck (Schooner)" (National Register summary): reference 10001092, listed December 28, 2010 (State Register May 7, 2010); builder William B. Redfield; Portland (Sandusky), Ohio, 1843; the Morris Tyler ownership and Lake Erie lakeshoring trade; the last five years on Lake Michigan in the lumber trade; the lakeshoring-schooner significance statement; the 170-foot depth.
  • Wisconsin Historical Society photo records (Tamara Thomsen, Maritime Preservation and Archaeology Program): repeated records of the Home site — "The William Fiske was able to rescue the crew of the Home, resulting in no loss of life," the starboard-bow collision damage, the net-recovered foremast at Rogers Street, and the "near Manitou Islands" / three-to-four-a.m. variants noted in the seams.
  • Wikipedia, "Home (shipwreck)": the cross-check summary drawing chiefly on Wisconsin Shipwrecks and Kohl's The Great Lakes Diving Guide (2001) — dimensions, the Winslow / White / Jones ownership, the 165–170 foot range, the Centerville coordinates, and the second-oldest designation.
  • NOAA designation reporting (June 2021) and sanctuary materials: Gallinipper (built 1833, sank 1851) and Home (built 1843, sank 1858) as Wisconsin's two oldest known shipwrecks — the standing promise this installment redeems.
  • The Cold Ledger, Installment #3 (the Gallinipper): the Rogers Street foremast record used in the foremast cross-check; Installment #4 (the Vernon): the anti-entry this installment pairs against.

Next: the Ledger stays with the wrecked and the written — the Rouse Simmons stays held for late November, where she belongs. The lake decides what surfaces in my reading; I just keep the notebook.

— J.

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