Powerful waves whipped up by a violent nor’easter exposed a 19th-century shipwreck buried beneath the sand on Nantucket as the storm swept across the East Coast with torrential rain, gale-force winds and coastal flooding.
A section of waterlogged timber, held together by rusted nails and strands of seaweed, was found Saturday on a beach along the south shore of the well-known Massachusetts island, according to video shared by the Nantucket Current.
The wooden wreckage is believed to have come from the Warren Sawyer, a schooner bound for New Orleans that crashed near Miacomet Beach in 1884.
The vessel was carrying cotton and scrap iron when gale-force winds pushed it off course. It ran aground on Nantucket at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 22, 1884, according to the outlet.
More remnants of the shipwreck had surfaced in the same area in December 2022.
After months of research, scientists concluded that the fragments 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 tern, 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 could not definitively identify the wreck as the Warren Sawyer because the fastening hardware recovered from the site did not match the vessel’s historical records.
The storm also caused significant beach erosion across Nantucket, the outlet reported.
The rare September nor’easter left widespread damage as it moved along much of the Eastern Seaboard, affecting areas from Massachusetts south through Long Island, New York City, New Jersey and Delaware.
Hundreds of thousands of people across several states lost power.
More than 27,600 customers in New York remained without electricity as of 2 a.m. Sunday, according to outage tracker Poweroutage.us.
Connecticut had another 26,000 customers without power.
Massachusetts reported approximately 11,500 outages.
The storm also proved deadly Saturday afternoon when Leighton Brown, a 56-year-old New York City Housing Authority worker, was struck and killed by a falling tree at the Cypress Hills Houses in Brooklyn, NYC Mayor Mamdani announced.
Brown was taken to a hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after 5 p.m. after suffering “trauma throughout his body.”
New York State Police were also searching for an unidentified swimmer who 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.