The schooner Wyoming sailed the Great Lakes in the early 20th century.

Photo courtesy Richard Brady

Winter for me is when I catch up on my book reading, and this years-books were about ships and ship disasters and shipwrecks of the five Great Lakes. It seems the most famous of all Great Lakes shipwrecks is, of course, the Edmund Fitzgerald told in stories and a song by Gordon Lightfoot.  

It wasn’t until I started to read about all these shipwrecks that I came upon something that piqued my interest even further. At this point I had a name and thought I needed to know more about this, and why not, a ship with the name of “Wyoming” was something I had to know more about. You might ask what could be so special about a ship named after the state of Wyoming? In truth this ship was and still is legendary on the East Coast at the Maine Maritime Museum.  

She was billed as the largest wooden six-masted schooner ever built, with dimensions that were staggering for the time. She was built and completed in 1909 at the Percy & Small ship building company in Bath, Maine. Her length of 450 feet from jib boom tip to spanker boom tip was astonishing. Her deck was 350 feet, and her beam was 50.1 feet. Depth of the hold was 33 feet, and of course her propulsion was by sail. She had six masts that were 126 feet tall and there were 22 sails in all which covered 39,826 square feet in sail area. She could make 16 knots or about 18 mph.

She was equipped with a Hyde anchor windlass, and a donkey steam engine which was used to raise and lower the sails. That steam engine did not power this schooner in any way, but it did allow for a smaller crew of 11 hands on board though her normal compliment of crew was listed as between 11 to 16. She had a dead weight of 6,004 long tons which is the weight of the ship fully loaded. She could carry 6,000 long tons of coal, and was built of yellow pine with 6 foot planking and there were 90 diagonal iron cross braces on each side.

She was named for the state of Wyoming because the then governor of Wyoming was Bryant Butler Brooks (1907-1921) who happened to be one of the investors in the ship, which cost around $175,000 in 1909 dollars (approximately $5,849,000 in today dollars). A smaller five-masted schooner built at the same ship company was the Governor Brooks, again named after Brooks. 

Because of her extreme length and wood construction, the Wyoming tended to flex in heavy seas, and this would cause the long planks to twist and buckle, thereby allowing seawater to intrude into the hold. Pumps were used to keep her hold relatively free of water but she foundered in a vicious gale on the night of March 10, 1924, going to the bottom of the Atlantic in around 70 feet of water, taking all hands with her. The ship was discovered in 2003, by the American Underwater Search and Survey Company after years of painstaking search. She rests off Nantucket a few miles off the Pollock Rip, which is a known section of rough water and Southeast of Monomoy Island.