How a Champagne-Laden Steamship Ended Up in a Kansas Cornfield
“You don’t have to go into the ocean to find a shipwreck,” says Kansas City explorer David Hawley. “They’re buried in your own back yard.”
Hawley and his intrepid team have quite the incredible passion: discovering and excavating steamboats from the 19th century that may have sunk in the Missouri, but now lie beneath fields of farmers' midwestern corn. “Ours is a tale of treasures lost,” says Hawley. “A journey to locate sunken steamboats mystery cargo that vanished long ago.”
In 1988, Hawley and his crew uncovered the steamboat Great White Arabia, which sank in 1856 a few miles west of Kansas City. The discovery yielded an incredible collection of well-preserved, pre-Civil War artifacts. Hawley, along with his father, brother and two friends, unearthed over 200 tons of items, the equivalent of 10 container trucks. Many of these artifacts, from shoes to champagne bottles, are on display at the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City. Its tagline is “200 tons of treasure.”
As the cargo deck was gradually unearthed, so too was the remarkable scale of the find. “The dishes were uncovered soon after,” says Hawley. “It was the dish barrel that really gave us the encouragement that the enormous amount of money being spent might actually be worth the gamble.”
Visiting the collection of treasure rescued from the Arabia, the scope of the artifacts is staggering. The Arabia was, after all, going to be supplying everything needed for 16 outpost towns. That meant everything from axes to saddles to skillets to umbrellas. To give some indication of scale, the team found over 4,000 shoes and boots and over three million Indian trade beads.
Today the collection is so vast it is housed in a former fruit market in Kansas City that the team turned into a museum. Walking inside is like stepping back in time into a well-stocked department store from just before the Civil War. And because of the peculiar nature of the moving of the Missouri River bank, the collection is mint and pristine. Crates of cognac and champagne taste just as they did in 1856. Household matches are dry enough to light the cords of still fragrant tobacco, that could still be smoked in the dozens upon dozens of preserved, delicate clay pipes.
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How very cool! What a vision this must take, to see to unearthing such a treasure!
This is amazing, Larry. And it's only a couple of hundred miles from our house. I''ll have to get up to KC to see this soon.
Great article, and the next up is the ''Malta''....
Can't wait to see what they pull outta the Malta!
Thanks for reading Kavika!
:~)
Thank you for posting it, Larry.
It's so much better than most of the shit on the FP...
Larry, if you added this to the title there might be more readers..
Drunk Hillary and Donald found onboard. Polls show that Trump also was using Heroin.
What a fascinating time capsule! Wonderful find, and utterly fascinating tale... I hope I get to see this!