BRICK, NEW JERSEY—Workers discovered a nineteenth-century shipwreck while building a 3.5-mile-long steel wall to protect a highway and oceanfront homes in an area of coastal New Jersey that was hard-hit by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. “They hit something. It broke the head on the machine. They decided to replace the head. They replaced the head, and it also broke,” Brick Deputy Office of Emergency Management Coordinator Joe Pawlowicz told CBS New York. The ship, which was made entirely of wood, is thought to be the Scottish brig Ayrshire, which ran aground during a storm in 1850. All but one of the passengers, who were immigrating from England and Ireland, were rescued with a newly developed life-car from a life-saving station on shore. “In the case of a near-shore disaster, you would set up a line between ship and shore. And in clothesline style, you would run this little metal cart out there, fill it with people, and then bring them back,” explained Dan Lieb of the New Jersey Shipwreck Museum. The wall-building project will continue around the wreckage until archaeologists determine if it should be excavated.
