Gold watch lost in Lake Michigan shipwreck 165 years ago returns home

When the Lady Elgin sank on Lake Michigan in 1860, British journalist and politician Herbert Ingram was lost to the deep, but 165 years later his pocket watch has returned home. The steamship quickly sank on Sept.8, 1860, when it collided with a schooner during a storm off Winnetka, Illinois, killing more than 300 people, with many unable to make it to lifeboats before it went down. Ingram and his son both died in the sinking with his gold watch going down with them.After the sinking, Ingram’s body was recovered, and he was returned to England, and buried in his hometown of Boston in Lincolnshire. The pocket watch was discovered by divers in 1992, but remained in the U.S.

until this May, when it was given to a historian to examine. “Back in 1992, when my team was documenting the remains of the Lady Elgin scattered over more than a mile of lake bottom, other divers were visiting the site,” Valerie Van Heest, co-founder of the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association who wrote “Lost on the Lady Elgin,” told FOX 17.“The location had leaked, and a trio of divers I have just recently learned, came upon a pocket watch.

A gold pocket watch, an extraordinary discovery.”She added that Ingram was a “member of Parliament.He was also the founder of the London Illustrated News, which was the first time a newspaper printed images in the paper.

So he was really the founder of pictorial journalism.”Van Heest told BBC News she quickly realized that the watch “doesn’t belong in America.It belongs in Boston, England, where Herbert Ingram was from, where a statue of him still stands.”Experts say the watch remained in relatively good condition while on the lake floor because of the lake’s cold, low-oxygen environment, according to People magazine. Ingram is celebrated as the “favorite son” of the Lincolnshire town where he was born and buried and where a statue of him stands. Van Fleet bought the watch, then donated it to the Boston Guil...