MADISON, Wis. — After decades of scouring the bottom of Lake Michigan, searchers have finally found the wreckage of a “ghost ship” that sank during a ferocious storm almost 140 years ago off the Wisconsin coastline.

The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association announced Monday that a team led by researcher Brendon Baillod found the wreck of the F.J. King. Baillod said in an email to The Associated Press that the wreckage was discovered on June 28.

According to the announcement, Baillod’s team found the ship off Bailey’s Harbor, a town of about 280 people on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, an outcropping of land jutting into Lake Michigan that gives the state its distinctive mitten-thumb shape.

The F. J. King was a 144-foot, three-masted cargo schooner built in 1867 in Toledo, Ohio, to transport grain and iron ore. According to the historical society and archaeology association’s announcement, the ship ran into a gale off the Door Peninsula on Sept. 15, 1886, while moving iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan, to Chicago.

Waves estimated at 8 to 10 feet ruptured her seams and after several hours of pumping Captain William Griffin ordered his men into the ship’s yawl boat. The schooner finally sank bow-first around 2 a.m., with the ship’s stern deckhouse blowing away in the storm, sending Griffin’s papers 50 feet into the air. A passing schooner picked up the crew and took them to Bailey’s Harbor.

Searchers have been trying to find the F.J. King since the 1970s but conflicting accounts of the ship’s location when it sank stymied their efforts. Griffin reported that the ship went down about 5 miles off Bailey’s Harbor but a lighthouse keeper reported seeing a schooner’s masts breaking the surface closer to shore.