The Point of Breakers Wreck Lost Its Name and Gained a Tag

On Saturday, September 26, a fisherman was checking his usual south shore spots for storm erosion. At Point of Breakers in Surfside, near the town's sewer beds, he found that the nor'easter had stripped away enough sand to expose a long row of old timbers and metal spikes. Within days the wreck was in national news. The state's coastal zone newsletter listed coverage from NPR, the AP, The Washington Post and others, most of it repeating the first guess: the timbers came from the Warren Sawyer, a schooner that wrecked on this shore in 1884.

That guess no longer holds. The wreck probably won't get a name to replace it. What it got instead on October 7 is a numbered tag. That makes it the first tracked shipwreck site in Massachusetts, and anyone who walks this beach after a storm can now add to its record.

Sixty-Forty, and Then a Different Ship

The first guess was reasonable. The Warren Sawyer was a three-masted schooner sailing from New Orleans to Boston with 1,115 bales of cotton and 28 tons of scrap iron. It wrecked near Miacomet Beach on December 22, 1884. In January 1885, The Inquirer and Mirror reported that within hours, waves had left "huge pieces of the vessel's deck, inestimable fragments of wood-work, broken spars, bales of cotton" tossing in the surf. More than a century later, two sections credited to that wreck turned up close by.

Tony Dumitru, museum and collections manager at the Egan Maritime Institute, inspected the new find first and sent a report to David Robinson, director and chief archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources. Working from that description, Robinson told The Inquirer and Mirror the wood and fasteners sounded like the same vintage and construction as the 2022 find. Asked how certain he was, he said "60, 40."

He came to see it for himself on Wednesday, October 7, and changed his view. "Based on the quality of the construction, it was not a schooner like the Warren Sawyer," he told The Inquirer and Mirror that day. He told the Nantucket Current the timbers were "significantly larger" than the 2022 pieces, and that the wreck had "a lot more yellow pine as opposed to some of the hardwoods." The new wreck also sits about a quarter mile east of where the Warren Sawyer pieces surfaced in 2022.

Here is how the three nearby finds compare:

By the state's figures, the Warren Sawyer was a 131-foot, 380-ton schooner. The new 50-foot section is longer than either earlier piece, and it came from a different, larger-timbered ship.

The Freight Car of the Coast

Robinson's working theory is a schooner barge. He described that type as "the last of the American merchant sailing fleet": sailing vessels often towed in strings behind a steam or diesel tug, "kind of like box cars on a train," carrying bulk cargo. He said most of the wrecks off this coast are schooner barges because so many of them were lost.

"What I'm seeing here is kind of the equivalent of seeing a piece of an 18-wheeler's container on the back of the rig on the side of the road. These are pretty common." David Robinson, Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources

The same commonness makes the wreck hard to name. Robinson dates the hull to the late 19th or early 20th century based on its metal fasteners, the tool marks on the wood and the shape of the timbers. Earlier American shipbuilders often used naturally curved limbs for a ship's frame. As forests were cut down, those limbs got scarce, and builders switched to straighter wood. By then, shipyards across the country were also using the same kinds of wood, so the species no longer points to where a ship was built. "It's like having a part of a door from a car, and it's hard to tell what car it came from," he told the Current.

Egan Maritime says it will work with the state over the coming weeks to try to match the timbers to historical records. Robinson has said that if the records don't match, "this will forever remain a mystery."

Why the Tag Matters More Than the Name

On the same visit, Robinson drove a tag into the wreck with a hammer and roofing nails. That made Point of Breakers the first site in Massachusetts in the Shipwreck Tagging Archaeological Management Program, known as STAMP. The Florida Public Archaeology Network at the University of West Florida created STAMP in 2019. The National Park Service and several states now use it, and the Massachusetts board adopted it in 2026. Robinson said he had wanted to do this for all seven years he has held the job.

The tag matters because wreckage on a sand beach moves. In Egan Maritime's October 8 release, the institute notes that storms, tides and erosion bury, uncover and shift wreck remains. That is a big part of why it is hard to tell whether a newly exposed piece belongs to a known wreck. Robinson said a tagged timber in Maryland, one of the states already using STAMP, traveled as far as 100 miles along the beach.

Here is how reporting a tagged timber works:

1. Each tag has its own number and QR code.
2. Scanning the code with a phone opens the national STAMP database, which asks for the timber's location, its condition and photos.
3. Each report adds to a record of how the wreckage moves and changes with coastal conditions.
4. STAMP is a national database, so Robinson also encourages people to report Massachusetts finds through the state's SHIPS reporting form. The form works for untagged timbers too.

Carlisle Jensen, Egan Maritime's executive director, said she and Robinson had stood on this beach "on a really chilly day in December" in 2022, when the Warren Sawyer bow surfaced. They talked then about "how cool it would be to have a mechanism that could do this." Egan estimates there are more than 750 shipwrecks in the waters around Nantucket.

What Visitors Are Asked to Leave Alone

The tagging came after a rough first week for the wreck. By the time the September 30 report ran, the pile of timber and spikes had become a local attraction, and one onlooker reported people taking souvenirs. At the October 7 visit, one timber looked like it had been sawed off. A sign now hangs on the wreck asking visitors not to disturb or vandalize it.

Shipwreck remains belong to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 91, Section 63 bars taking from a wreck except by permit. According to The Inquirer and Mirror, violations can bring a misdemeanor charge, a fine of up to $1,000 or jail time. Egan Maritime welcomes people coming to look. It asks them not to walk over the wreck, dig at the site or remove anything, and it says it has no plans to seek a permit to remove the wreck itself.

As of Egan's October 8 release, the wreck was still exposed. The same forces that uncovered it can bury it again, and Robinson doesn't mind. He compared oxygen-free burial to "sticking something in the refrigerator," and said "letting this get reburied isn't the worst thing." Recovery is unlikely in any case. Conserving waterlogged timber means removing the salt, stabilizing the wood and caring for it permanently, and he said the state reserves that for finds that are "very special and highly at risk."

Low Beach Gave Up Pieces Too

The same storm uncovered three more timbers on Low Beach in 'Sconset. Robinson identified them as frame fragments, citing "their tree-nail fasteners and curved shape." Tree nails are wooden pegs used to fasten ship timbers together. He said the pieces appear to come from "double-sawn" frames, which were typical of ships built in the second half of the 19th century and later.

Nobody knows yet whether the three pieces came from one ship. After a nor'easter last October, a fragment found on the same beach was judged likely to be from the Evelyn M. Thompson, a schooner built in 1908. She struck a shoal off Low Beach on July 14, 1918, and broke apart over several days.

Finds from both beaches go to the same state board, which takes shoreline reports through its SHIPS form. Egan Maritime points people to the Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum to learn how the Massachusetts Humane Society, the U.S. Life-Saving Service and the Coast Guard rescued and aided the crews of these wrecks. If the tagged section moves after the next storm, whoever finds it on the beach can scan the tag and log where it landed.

At Jen Allen, we watch the south shore closely, because the same sand that hides and reveals these timbers shapes Surfside property from one season to the next. If you'd like to talk through what this stretch of coast is doing, and what it means for a property you own or are considering, we would be glad to Start the Conversation.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.