Texas drought exposes resting place of five sunken World War I ships in Neches River

When the water is low, Texas rivers reveal their tightly held secrets.

Such is the case with the Neches River, which curls through thick forest and underbrush in East Texas. The region is undergoing an exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

In a time of puddling water and exposed sandbars, Bill Milner, who grew up on the river, found the last resting place of five sizable ships along the Lower Neches near Beaumont on Aug. 18.

Milner spent hours documenting and photographing what looked to be the remains of steamboats and then reported his findings to Susan Kilcrease of the Ice House Museum in nearby Silsbee. She, in turn, contacted Amy Borgens, state marine archaeologist with the Texas Historical Commission, who eventually identified them through GPS coordinates as emergency merchant vessels built by the United States to replace a diminished fleet during World War I.

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"The wreck, sometimes visible to boaters and others using the river, is one of more than a dozen vessels that had been abandoned after World War I," a Texas Historical Commission press release stated on Aug. 24.

In fact, a state archaeology team conducting a sonar survey of five miles of the Neches in 2019 documented quite a few sunken wrecks in the area.

Why was Milner able to find these sunken ships?

Like many Texas rivers this season, the Neches, which flows southeast from Van Zandt County to meet the Sabine River at Sabine Lake near Port Arthur, is running low.

"It's down a lot," Michael Banks, co-chairman of Friends of the Neches River National Wildlife Refuge, an advocacy group, told the American-Statesman. "We usually get 50 inches of rain a year. There's still water in the river, and it's still flowing. But a lot lower than usual. And of course, in a few months it should be overflowing again."

To keep the Neches, which used to be a major transportation link between the Gulf of Mexico and East Texas, flowing, water must be released from Lake Palestine and other reservoirs located on the Upper Neches.

Low rivers and lakes promise few benefits for Texans, but they do expose historic and prehistoric sites. In 2011, when Lake Travis' levels shrank, one could explore the remains of historic Anderson Mill. In general, the curious can visit a replica of the mill built on higher ground by the Anderson Mill Garden Club.

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This summer, the shallow parts of the Neches encouraged inquisitive types to explore areas ordinarily submerged.

"With the river being at an historic low, our river people have been out searching for steamboats, as you probably know," Kilcrease posted on the Ice House Museum's Facebook page on Aug. 19. The post has 330,000 views and counting. "We have found some really cool stuff! But Bill Milner made a major discovery yesterday. He found five wrecks of very old wooden boats. These boats were found in a range of between knee deep water extending to depths where they could not be seen."

What were the ships in the Neches graveyard?

Kilcrease knew about Austin marine archaeologist Borgens in part because she was one of the divers who located the silted-over Neches Belle, a wooden paddleboat used to ship cotton and wool along the Sabine and Neches rivers. Commissioned in 1889, it went down in 1897 in the Sabine near Logansport, Louisiana.

At first, Kilcrease wondered whether Milner had found a similar steamboat.

"It is definitely a very large, very old wooden vessel, and there are five of these vessels," she posted. "They are, like the Neches Belle, stuck in the river bottom and silted over and extend into the bank — buried. There is a large cypress tree growing through one of the boats that has some age to it."

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Borgens, unsurprised by the find, had a good idea of what Milner had discovered. But she needed the GPS coordinates to be sure.

"We have so many shipwrecks in the Neches River, many that are undiscovered, but there’s dozens that have already been documented in the river," Borgens said on public radio's Texas Standard show on Aug. 25. "So when I received that report, it was really about learning the position of where that wreck was, to see if it was one that was already known to the agency."

Turns out that the wrecks Milner found were among more than a dozen World War I Emergency Fleet Corp ships that had been abandoned in the Neches upstream of Beaumont. Built of Texas pine, because of a metal shortage during they war, in shipyards along the river, the vessels sailed the Gulf and the Atlantic.

After the war, they were deemed useless.

What will happen to the newly discovered ships?

"The reason that you find these in the Neches is because when the war ended, the ships sort of lost their purpose," Borgens said on Texas Standard. "And it was really difficult for the government to find buyers for wooden-hulled ships at that time. And so these vessels, many of which were constructed at a cost of $250,000 each, some of these were sold for just $1,000, just for the salvage of wood and iron."

"With vessels of this type, of this size, where there are so many of them, really the best approach for preservation is what we call in situ preservation: just leaving them in place and not disturbing them," Borgens continued. "Preservation of wooden-hulled vessels of that size is just almost cost prohibitive when you’re looking at a 280-foot-long waterlogged wooden vessel."

Nearly 40 such ships remain sunk in East Texas rivers, one of largest abandonment sites in the U.S. As always, it is best for the public to leave them alone. If you find anything like these sunken vessels, or any historic artifact, contact the local county historical commission, which can forward the discoveries to the proper state agency.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at mbarnes@gannett.com.