Canadian film crew is fishing for history in Neches River
For decades, commercial fishermen Justin Gerbrandt and Mike Lenton have navigated the frigid waters of Canada’s Lake Winnipeg fishing for walleye.
Now, they’ve cast a line in a different direction. They’re on a hunt for history, a project that has led them to the Southeast Texas city of Silsbee to investigate the sunken ships in the Neches River.
The pair are stars of Canadian production company Farpoint Films’ newest television series, “Fishing for History.”
It’s a concept that show producer/director Scott Leary developed during the pandemic while watching YouTube videos and stumbling upon one about magnet fishing.
The idea is similar to using metal detectors to search for treasures buried underground but on the water. Practitioners use high-powered magnets to retrieve items from below the surface.
Leary’s been behind the lens of another series years before, called Ice Vikings. The show documented the life and times of Canada’s commercial fishermen, including Gerbrandt and Lenton. The new series could be on U.S. television by next year.
“We started out catching fish, and now we’re catching metal artifacts,” Gerbrandt said. “I never thought we’d be doing a show on fishing for artifacts of history, but it’s been an awesome journey for us.”
It’s taken them, Leary and his two-man crew, including cinematographer Quan Luong and soundman Kevin Bacon, 146,000 air miles of travel. They’ve touched down across North America, including in multiple locations in their Canadian homeland, the Pacific Northwest and several U.S. states throughout the past year.
It brought them to Silsbee, northeast of Houston, to film season one’s final episode, on the Neches.
It’s a story the show’s re
search team discovered after Ice House Museum Director Susan Kilcrease posted about the shipwrecks discovered amid last summer’s drought. The posts went viral.
As the Neches River water table lowered, Kilcrease asked local rivermen and boaters to be on the lookout for emerging treasures — pieces of history 100 years old and more that might suddenly emerge from the ever-shallow waters of the Neches.
Bill Milner was the first to bring bits of lost history.
He discovered the centuryold cypress-wood canoe that now sits on display in the Silsbee Museum — officially on loan from the Texas Historical Commission, which owns all recovered historic artifacts.
While trolling the river where he’s boated and fished since childhood, Milner discovered much more in the hollows of the Neches River.
He found the remnants of World War I-era wooden merchant ships — vessels that built on the Neches riverbanks.
Kilcrease knew the stories of those ships, built on the island just north of the Port of Beaumont. A 100-plus fleet was enlisted into service as German submarines continued sinking needed merchant supply vessels on the Atlantic coast.
With steel production unable to supply the demand of the diminished merchant fleet, wooden ships were deemed the route to go.
And where better to have an endless supply of hardy wood than Southeast Texas? The region was rife with timber, Kilcrease told Leary’s cast and crew, who’d assembled at the Ice House Museum earlier this month to begin filming for the segment.
Soon, the docks in Beaumont were flooded with workers building the huge steampowered vessels.
The size of the ships and sheer manpower needed to assemble them in a time bereft of modern mechanics were aweinspiring.
When the war ended, the ships were salvaged for parts, then moved to other parts of the river where they were moored to the river banks, sometimes in groups of twos and threes. Many fell prey to “mysterious fires” that sent them sinking to the depths of the Neches River, she said.
Kilcrease theorized the fleet was something of an embarrassment — millions of dollars’ worth investment of time, money and labor left to deteriorate on a riverfront for all to see.
“You know what I mean when I say, ‘They mysteriously caught on fire,’ ” she said midfilming.
Set aflame until they sunk, they were now out of sight, out of mind.
There was no mystery surrounding the story or whereabouts of at least one of those ships.
Its fate had been documented in news articles after catching fire, breaking free of its mooring and drifting down river into the path of the wood bridge connecting Beaumont to Orange County — now the Veteran’s Bridge.
In the mid-1920s, when the burning ship struck the bridge, it caught fire, as well.
Beaumont firefighters managed to extinguish the fire, sparing the city from being cut off from travel east of the river.
When the new concrete bridge was constructed, crews had to navigate around the large wooden ship’s wreckage to ensure they didn’t “put a concrete pylon down into it,” Milner said.
Its graveyard is ironic, as it’s located less than a mile from where it was first constructed.
“It was born there and it died there,” Milner said as he and the show crew toured the shipwreck sites on the river aboard the Ivory Bill.
Gerbrandt marveled that what he thought would be a search for artifacts on sunken ships would turn out to be a hunt for WWI history.
“Everywhere we go, it’s a new story and part of history we didn’t know about before,” he said.
Even with the magnet fishing gear, they didn’t anticipate finding any WWI-era ship artifacts.
But that’s OK — they’ve already got what they really came for.
“The true treasures we’re finding are the stories of places like Silsbee — what a funky little town. We’ve been to Houston and New Orleans, but we’ve never been off the beaten path this far,” Leary said. “We love getting out, meeting people and capturing their stories on camera.”
It’s the story of Silsbee, of Beaumont and of how WWI impacted Southeast Texas. But it’s also the story of people like Milner, whose love of the water runs deeper than any wrecked ship.
While aboard the Ivory Bill, the conversation turned as much to fishing for fish as for history — Milner pointing out some of his best fishing holes while traversing the river from the port where the ships were built to the river sites where their sunken remains lie.
For him, the Canadian TV crew was a welcome show of interest in local history that Milner feared might not resurface as rising river levels have obscured the ships from sight.
“I don’t know why no one wants to excavate one of them (to preserve their place in history), but they aren’t interested,” he said.
Eventually, the river will overtake the wood, rotting the sunken ships into oblivion.
“It’ll be history lost,” Milner said. “It’s sad.”