Thumb Area Bottomland Preserve
protected area in Michigan, US
The Thumb Area Bottomland Preserve, also called the Thumb Area Underwater Preserve, is a preservation area in Lake Huron in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is 276 square miles (710 km2) in size and is located off Michigan's Thumb north of Detroit.
Description
The Thumb Area Bottomland Preserve protects bottomlands off Pointe aux Barques and the beach port towns of Harbor Beach, Huron City, and Port Austin. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has counted 10 known shipwrecks within the boundaries protected by the preserve.
Two package freighters, Philadelphia and Albany sank after colliding off Pointe Aux Barques in 1893.
As in most of the Great Lakes, most of the shipwrecks predate the consolidation of federal marine safety services into the United States Coast Guard in 1915.
The foundered SS Daniel J. Morrell, a lake freighter which split in two and sank in 1966 with a loss of 28 lives, also lies off the shore of Michigan's Thumb, but outside the boundaries of the preserve.
The preserve protects a network of limestone sea caves off Port Austin. Near Port Austin is the largely depopulated former town of Grindstone City, where grindstones were quarried. Some of the specialized stones were lost overboard near the quarries and can be seen underwater as of 2009.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Thumb Area Bottomland Preserve” is protected area in Michigan, US. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Thumb, Area and Bottomland, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7798793. Authority coordinates are 44.023, -82.771. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1915, 1966 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thumb Area Bottomland Preserve” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.