The serenity of Anastasia Island is broken only by an electric buzzing sound coming from Ed Coward while uncovering the past.
“This is a flat iron,” says the retired engineer while using a drill device to uncover artifacts that were lost at sea.
“I’ve always been a history buff, and like to do things with history, so this is digging out history,” Ed says.
Several times a week, Ed becomes part of a new exhibit at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum, removing concretions from buried treasure.
Inside “Wrecked,” discover the candlestick and cannonballs Ed helped cleaned up, along with 598 other pieces of history.
Roughly 100 years before the St. Augustine Lighthouse opened, 16 ships sank off the coast of St. Augustine in December 1782. Yet, it wasn’t until 2009 that archeologists working on behalf of the lighthouse discovered something buried under the surface.
“It kind of looks like a big rock, when we go down there and start pulling these things up,” says Shannon O’Neil with the St. Augustine Lighthouse.
What was located on the ocean floor, and properly salvaged, is ready for a public debut this weekend.
“Our cannon was in electrolytic reduction for four years,” Shannon explains.
Artifacts from mess kits like spoons and even a keg tap found in an open position are cleaned up and ready to be viewed.
“It could have been stored that way,” Shannon says of the golden keg tap. “But we like to theorize that when the ship ran aground… maybe they had a little bit to drink before they evacuated the ship!”
The name of the ship is still a mystery.
An interactive area of the exhibit allows little hands to uncover the same artifacts that Ed is now restoring, even if it’s for another kind of preservation.
“My wife gets me out of the house one day a week,” Ed jokes.
NOTE: “Wrecked!” at the St. Augustine Museum is now open daily. New artifacts will be put on display, as soon as Ed cleans them up.
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