I never heard of this until just now! TL : DR - a ship capsized in the Missouri River, near Kansas City, in 1856 while the river was being subjected to a diversion project (yeah, that didn’t work so well) and not discovered until 1988. Artifacts are still being catalogued. I thought this story was cool enough to share. Enjoy.
You probably didn’t see this this post of mine last summer:
Or if I did, I don’t remember. Thanks!
I’ve visted the museum. The recovered artifacts are impressive and pedestrian at the same time – there was a lot of stuff which would have been common merchandise execpt that it was so old. The fact that they were so well-preserved added to the dissonance – much looked almost new and almost all of it was in terrific condition. So, an extreme example of New Old Stock.
A good book on the discovery and excavation of the Arabia is Treasure In A Cornfield, written by Greg Hawley. I met him at the museum in 2004, a really nice guy.
I’ve toured the museum, at a Dopefest years ago. It’s well worth the trip. As others have said the artifacts are well preserved. There’s food, clothing, tools, dishes, you name it. Steamboats like that carried goods the way big trucks do today.
I was disappointed with the quality of the tiny pictures on the Atlas Obscura article, so I went to the museum site in Railer13’s post. It has a 360 degree virtual tour, but it costs money, which I don’t mind paying to contribute to the museum, but I wasn’t prepared to commit to that right now. The site does have a nice video about the museum and other info about the Arabia and the ongoing search for the Malta, an even older steamship that sank in 1841.
From what I could see in the video, the preservation quality and sheer quantity of goods from the Arabia is indeed amazing.
Yeah, the Missouri used to change course pretty often and dramatically back in those days. The town of Weston, MO was for a time, the second busiest steamboat port on the river, beyond both Kansas City and St. Joseph and was also the largest city in Missouri for a while.
Then the river changed course in a flood, and the town has been about two miles from the river ever since, dwindling down to a sleepy town of about 1700 people.
The riverboat Sultana sank in the Mississippi river just after the Civil War. The course of the river changed, and the boat was found underneath a pea field on the Arkansas side.