Pocket Watch Recovered From Lake Michigan’s Deadliest Shipwreck Returns to Owner’s Hometown After 165 Years
The timepiece belonged to Herbert Ingram, a British journalist and politician who died when the “Lady Elgin” sank in 1860. His watch was recovered from the bottom of the lake in 1992
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A pocket watch discovered in a deadly Lake Michigan shipwreck has returned home to the United Kingdom after 165 years.
The watch belonged to Herbert Ingram, a British journalist and politician from Boston, Lincolnshire, England. In 1860, Ingram died while sailing aboard the Lady Elgin, a steamship that sank after being hit by another vessel on Lake Michigan.
His body was recovered and returned to England. But his pocket watch sank to the bottom of the lake. Now, it’s been returned to his hometown, just in time for an exhibition about his life and legacy.
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The wreck of the Lady Elgin was one of the worst maritime disasters on the Great Lakes, killing more than 300 passengers. Many aboard the steamship were Irish-American soldiers with the Wisconsin Union Guard militia unit, as Hannah Edgar reported for the Chicago Tribune last year.
After Wisconsin’s governor confiscated their weapons, the soldiers chartered the Lady Elgin to raise money for the purchase of new muskets. They had also hoped to attend a political rally in Chicago.
On the return to Milwaukee, the ship encountered bad weather and poor visibility. In the early morning hours of September 8, 1860, the lumber schooner Augusta collided with the Lady Elgin. The Augusta suffered minimal damage and continued on, but the Lady Elgin sank within half an hour off the coast of northern Illinois.
The Lady Elgin was discovered near Highland Park in 1989 by a private salvor named Harry Zych. A year earlier, federal lawmakers had enacted the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1988, which made abandoned vessels the property of the state. But Zych successfully argued in court that the ship had never been legally abandoned, meaning that the new law didn’t apply.
Zych eventually became the shipwreck’s legal owner. To this day, it’s still one of the few privately owned shipwrecks in the world and the only one in the Great Lakes, per the Chicago Tribune.
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In September 1992, divers exploring the shipwreck discovered a gold pocket watch with a chain and a wax seal fob. They held onto it until last year, when they decided to approach Valerie van Heest, an archaeologist and historian who’d led a state-sponsored study of the wreck in the 1990s.
Van Heest, who is based in Holland, Michigan, co-founded the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association and wrote a book commemorating the 150th anniversary of Lady Elgin’s sinking, per Divernet’s Steve Weinman. She also curated an exhibition about the shipwreck for the Chicago Maritime Museum last year.
To confirm the timepiece’s provenance, Van Heest worked with a watch expert. The case is engraved with the name of the manufacturer: the John Bennet Company of Cheapside, England, which specialized in fine watches during the 19th century. In addition, the wax seal fob bears the initials “H.I.” carved in sardonyx stone.
Ingram was the only person aboard the ship with those initials and the only foreign passenger. Ingram had also been a member of Parliament, and he would have likely authenticated his signature with a personalized wax seal.
Van Heest “very quickly came to the realization it doesn’t belong in America,” she tells BBC News’ Sarah-May Buccieri. She wanted to return it to Ingram’s hometown, which has a statue of him in its town square.
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Van Heest purchased the watch and donated it to the town of Boston, England. As it happened, curators at the Boston Guildhall museum were planning an exhibition about Ingram called “Herbert Ingram: Illustrating the News.” (In addition to being a member of Parliament, Ingram founded the Illustrated London News, the city’s first illustrated periodical.)
“They didn’t have any physical artifacts, and here I was offering not only an artifact, but Herbert Ingram’s personal watch,” Van Heest tells WXMI’s Andy Curtis. “It was an extraordinary, serendipitous occurrence.”
Van Heest flew to England to hand-deliver the watch. While there, she also gave a lecture about Ingram’s life and death.
“Returning this watch is the right thing to do,” Van Heest tells WXMI. “This is reminding people that shipwrecks affected people, affected families, and this shows that 165 years later, we care. People care about the individuals lost.”
Sarah Sharpe, a member of the Boston Borough Council who specializes in heritage and culture, was so excited about the return that she “couldn’t sit down,” she tells BBC News.
“Since then I’ve been absolutely buzzing,” she adds. “Herbert Ingram was one of our most influential people.”
