The ship went down on December 22, 1884, while hauling cotton and scrap iron from New Orleans to Boston. It ran aground in what's known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, and its captain and crew of seven all made it off alive before the vessel came apart on the shoreline over the following weeks.
Marine investigators in Massachusetts are now examining splintered timbers held together by rusted iron that surfaced in the sand during the storm, close to where smaller pieces of the wreck have shown up before. The storm's punishing winds and waves did what more than a century of tides apparently couldn't, dragging a piece of Nantucket's maritime past back into view.
For people who study shipwrecks along that stretch of coast, this is a rare shot at getting a firsthand look at a vessel most only knew from old records and scattered debris. The timbers give investigators a chance to study construction details and confirm exactly how the Warren Sawyer was built, more than 140 years after the wreck.
A ship that broke apart in weeks somehow left enough behind to still be making news well over a century later.