In 1990 I was on the beach at Surf, next to Lompoc, California. I took a stroll down, and found a shipwreck there, a wooden hull with metal lining, protruding out of the sand. Now, obviously, I don’t mean I found it as in, nobody had ever seen it before. I just mean that I had not been there before. As it turns out, the wreck is very close to SLC-3 and SLC-4, both part of the Vanderburgh Lunch Complex. Just a little further down is where my grandfather was working at the time, and SLC-6, building a launch pad for the Space Shuttle, which was soon after abandoned due to budget cuts in the program. It was an exciting opportunity to try to see where grandpa worked, but as it turned out, it was not reachable du to the distance being too far for me to go on that short trip, and due to the beach. But I did get to see this shipwreck.
The ship was the Sibyl Marston, commissioned in 1907 at the Boole Shipyard in Oakland, and only two years old as it turned out the night it was sailing past Lompoc, January 12th, 1909. It was stormy that night, and her captain, Capt. C. Schillinsky, mistook the lights at Surf for the lights at Point Arguello, and so turned left and ran the ship aground on the beach a mile south of the current Amtrak Station. The ship was laden with 1,100,000 board feet of redwood lumber, 800,000 feet of which was below deck, with the rest on top. The lumber on top swept two of the crew over when it fell overboard as she ran aground. They both died. The wreck was reported in an Ogden, Utah paper as follows:
In the weeks that followed, and insurance adjuster determined quickly that the ship could be salvaged, but due to another wreck, attention was turned to it, and the Marston was eventually damaged too badly to be recovered. Some people from Lompoc did salvage the lumber, however, and took it by horse and cart back to the city, where it was used to build houses, two of which still stand along H Street today. They are 326 H, and 105 East Olive.
The ship was named after the daughter of its owner, herself only 24 at the time of its sinking. Sibyl Marston went on to study fencing at the University of Berkley, and eventually died at the age of 90, in 1975.
Sibyl was remembered by her nephew, Phillip Gale of Berkley as “quite a character,” and a “fiercely independent” woman who never married. In her later years, though she was afflicted with vision problems, she lived alone. Sibyl was sonly six months old when she took her first voyage to Hawaii. Then, in 1888, Captain William Marston and his wife set out from Scotland to Australia when Sibyl’s younger brother, Ellery, died of the coast of Tristan, in the South Atlantic. Sibyl was quite fond of Ellery, and took his loss quite hard.
Sibyl’s father, Captain William H. Marston, of Berkley, sailed under Hawaiian Flags and British flags, but left the sea in 1891, and became an owner instead, whereupon the family fortunes spiked upwards, eventually valuing at $6,000,000.
For the complete article from The Lompoc Record, see this link: https://lompocrecord.com/news/local/inheriting-a-piece-of-history/article_2ddf6e2b-233e-53df-b5b1-5acd3061ed79.html.
Kelsey J Bacon