The Nation - News from Sept. 22, 1989

The explorer who found the wreck of the Titanic announced the discovery of a 19th-Century schooner, two vintage rail cars and, possibly, the site of Benedict Arnold’s Revolutionary War gunboat in Lake Champlain. A team led by Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod found the schooner Sarah Ellen apparently upright and virtually intact on the lake floor under about 300 feet of water, officials said. The 73-foot-long, two-masted commercial schooner sank in a storm on Dec. 16, 1860, killing its 21-year-old captain and his bride. The researchers also found two railroad cars believed to have fallen off a schooner while being transported across the lake, which is located in northwest Vermont and northeast New York state, during a storm in 1849 or 1850. The cars are believed to be among the oldest known in existence.