These sorts of things don't happen very often, especially not in places that are as heavily traveled as the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
I know it doesn't look like much and it certainly is not the entire ship and it is easy to understand why since the ebb and flow of the tides have been beating away at this for centuries. It was found by local tour guide Ray Stallings, who is someone that I have actually met before, so this story is extra cool to me. Tours obviously are way down for everything including tours of the Outer Banks in winter but this piece of a shipwreck is reckoned to be the Noomis or another ship called the Home.
It would be a lot cooler if it was actually "The Home" because that steamer is significantly older and is shrouded more in mystery. The fact that we have a photo of the initial Noomis (above) after it went aground in 1935 makes it a bit less of a mystery.
I can't find any images of "The Home" and that could be because there aren't any. However, both ships are believed to have gone aground in North Carolina, one in 1935 and the other in 1837.
North Carolina has a long history of shipwrecks because prior to the existence of helpful tools like detailed maps and GPS the outer banks were not terribly visible to captains during high tide.
A great deal of the Outer Banks would have been washed away quite some time ago but since the real estate has become so popular (and expensive) tons of money are spent every year to dredge and create seawalls to prevent the sea from reclaiming the land. This is a particularly difficult task to maintain during hurricane season which comes predictably every year. To me, it seems a bit silly that people continue to build houses out there since it is an eventuality that the sea is eventually going to win this battle no matter how much money is thrown at this project.
At the moment tours of the wreck are being conducted but unfortunately for Ray Stallings it is going to take more than a couple of planks of wood covered in sand to get me all the way out there :)
It's a pretty sweet find anyway though.