The Robert H. Dixey, or what's left of it, may have found it's once and final resting place in a Mobile area landfill.
According to a news article in today's Mobile Register the relic was trucked to a landfill recently.
We wrote several articles about the shipwreck over the past several months. The saga began with Katrina dredging a huge chunk of what was believed to be the Robert H. Dixey and using it to destroy and damage homes on Dauphin Island's west end beach.
When the relic was discovered by a local marine archaeologist a brief flurry of activity ensued to dig it out of the sand beneath a vacation beach home and preserve it for its historic value. A local restaurant owner proposed using his flooded restaurant as a storage facility where the preservation process could take place.
That plan fell apart when the preservationist team could not figure out how to move it from under the house. Eventually they lost interest. The vacation home owner took matters into his own hands and dragged the relic to the side of Bienville Blvd, where it sat in the sun for several months.
Presumably the vacation home owners finally tired of looking at it and had it picked up and trucked to the landfill.
Read previous stories about the Robert H. Dixey
Island shipwreck taken to landfill
A possibly historic segment of a shipwrecked vessel found under a Dauphin Island house after last year's hurricanes has been hauled off to a north Mobile County landfill, according to a businessman who volunteered to preserve the artifact.
Looking to recover the wreck is island business owner Doug Ford, who promised in March to conserve it as a tourist attraction inside one of his two Hurricane Katrina-damaged restaurants.
"Why would they pay to haul it all the way to this landfill when they could have hauled it half a mile down the road to my restaurant?" Ford said.
Ford and a score of local history buffs volunteered to help preserve the 40-foot-long hunk of wood after a Mobile-born marine archaeologist reported finding it in February.
The possibly historic wreckage had sat on the roadside on the island's west end, drying out under the hot sun, since the property owner's contractor dragged it there six months ago. Ford said he had hired two different contractors to move the wreckage and repair his restaurants, but each deal fell through.
Ford said Tuesday that workers with his current contractor -- Ducky Johnson House and Structure Movers of Grand Ridge, Fla. -- arrived at the site last week to move the ship fragment to his property only to find it gone. The hulk appeared to have been taken away sometime in the last two weeks, Ford said.
Ford said the workers since had determined the fragment was disposed of in a north Mobile County landfill and is still in one piece. He said he had been given no landfill name, and Press-Register efforts to contact Ducky Johnson were unsuccessful.
Ford said he hopes the wreckage can be recovered and returned to the island as early as today.
Ford and town officials said the owners of the home where the wreck was found, Wayne and Alice Moore, had paid to dispose of the ship fragment. When the Press-Register contacted Alice Moore by telephone at the couple's New Orleans home Tuesday, she declined comment.
Glenn Forest, an archaeological diver, found the wreckage in February and persuaded a home repair crew not to cut it into pieces and haul it to the dump.