Powerful waves generated by a violent nor’easter exposed a 19th-century shipwreck buried beneath Nantucket’s sands as the storm swept across the East Coast with torrential rain, hurricane-force gusts and coastal flooding.
A section of waterlogged timber, bound by rusted nails and tangled seaweed, was found Saturday on a beach along the Massachusetts island’s south shore, according to video posted by the Nantucket Current.
The debris is believed to have come from the Warren Sawyer, a schooner sailing toward New Orleans that wrecked near Miacomet Beach in 1884.
The vessel was carrying cotton and scrap iron when gale-force winds pushed it off course and drove it onto Nantucket at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 22, 1884, the outlet reported.
More remnants of the wreck had surfaced in the same area in December 2022.
After months of research, scientists concluded that the pieces most likely belonged to the Warren Sawyer.
“As with most historical archaeological research, exploring the available literature, archival, photographic, and archaeological evidence we collectively assembled for the site to try to arrive at a conclusive determination as to whether or not the wreckage is from the schooner, Warren Sawyer, was a bit like pulling a thread on a sweater,” Massachusetts Archeologist David Robinson told the Nantucket Current. “The more interesting information I looked at, the more that I found.”
Researchers initially stopped short of definitively identifying the wreck because the fastening hardware recovered from the site did not match the Warren Sawyer’s recorded specifications.
The storm also caused significant beach erosion across Nantucket, according to the outlet.
The unusual September nor’easter carved a path of destruction along much of the Eastern Seaboard, affecting areas from Massachusetts through Long Island, New York City, New Jersey and Delaware.
Hundreds of thousands of customers across several states lost electricity.
More than 27,600 customers in New York remained without power as of 2 a.m. Sunday, according to the outage tracker Poweroutage.us.
Connecticut reported another 26,000 customers without electricity.
In Massachusetts, approximately 11,500 customers were still in the dark.
The storm also turned fatal Saturday afternoon when Leighton Brown, a 56-year-old New York City Housing Authority employee, was struck and killed by a falling tree at the Cypress Hills Houses in Brooklyn, Mayor Mamdani announced.
Brown was taken to a hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after 5 p.m. He had suffered “trauma throughout his body.”
New York State Police separately said an unidentified swimmer disappeared in the waters off Robert Moses State Park on Long Island.
“On Saturday, September 26, 2026, at approximately 2:30 p.m., a white male wearing dark colored shorts was seen in the ocean water when he disappeared from view and was not seen exiting the water,” troopers said.
