The Alvin Clark was built around 1846 or 1847, likely by shipmaker John Clark, who named the two-masted schooner after his son. Under her first owner, Clark used her to haul salt. When he sold her in 1852 to her second owner, Captain William M. Higgie of Racine, Wisconsin, she became a workhorse of the Great Lakes lumber trade, hauling timber from Wisconsin's north woods to the hungry sawmills and construction sites of Chicago. Higgie kept her running those routes for years. On June 19, 1864, the Alvin Clark was heading through Lake Michigan toward Oconto, Wisconsin, to pick up a load of lumber. She was running empty under full sail when a storm caught her in Green Bay. The schooner went down, settling into the cold, deep water where she would remain undisturbed for over a century.

In 1967, a diver named Frank Hoffman discovered the wreck and was astonished by what he found. The ship was completely intact, her hull and timbers preserved by the frigid, oxygen-starved waters of Green Bay. A stencil made belowdecks by one of her original sailors positively identified her as the Alvin Clark. Hoffman secured the salvage rights and in 1969 raised the vessel, towing her to Menominee, Michigan, where he moored her in the Menominee River at the foot of Sixth Avenue. He christened the attraction the Mystery Ship Seaport and opened it as a museum. The ship earned recognition as a Michigan State Historic Site in 1972 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. For a brief moment, the Alvin Clark was a celebrated piece of living maritime history.

But the very act of saving the Alvin Clark sealed her fate. Freed from the cold, low-oxygen waters that had kept her timbers sound for a century, the ship immediately began to deteriorate. The wood that had survived since the 1840s started to rot, crack, and crumble in the open air. Museum proceeds never came close to covering Hoffman's mounting debt of $300,000, let alone the cost of proper preservation. By the mid-1980s, the dream had become a financial nightmare. In 1987, Hoffman sold the ship -- now little more than a hulk -- to a group of local investors for $117,000. They moved and stabilized her, but the damage was already too far gone. The Alvin Clark was declared a public hazard.

In 1994, the Mystery Ship Seaport and the remains of the Alvin Clark were demolished. The site was cleared and paved over as a parking lot. The ship was removed from the National Register of Historic Places on June 10, 2020, a final administrative closing of the book. Today, nothing at the foot of Sixth Avenue in Menominee marks where one of the oldest surviving Great Lakes schooners once stood. The Alvin Clark's story has become a cautionary tale in maritime preservation circles: a reminder that the conditions of discovery are not always the conditions of survival, and that raising a shipwreck without the resources to maintain it can be worse than leaving it on the bottom.