LANSING—From an abandoned farmstead on national forest land near Cadillac to the chill waters of the Straits of Mackinac, plunderers are looting bits and pieces of Michigan’s historical heritage.

“Unfortunately, it’s not common but it occurs with some regularity where people will come out with a metal detector and assume it’s OK,” said Kenneth Arbogast, the Huron-Manistee National Forest public affairs officer.

John Franzen, an archeologist at Hiawatha National Forest in the central and eastern Upper Peninsula, said, “Years ago it was mainly bottle collecting. With the advent of metal detectors, it’s taken a big change.

“We call it vandalism by treasure hunters,” he said.

“Logging camps have been the target, both in past years for bottles and in more recent years for metal objects such as tools and coins,” Franzen said.

Thieves’ motives vary, said Wayne Lusardi, the state’s Alpena-based maritime archeologist.

“Some people are ignorant of the laws and want a little piece, a memento. Others are fully aware it’s illegal but it’s for a personal collection, and others look at from a financial gain point of view,” Lusardi said, adding that many artifacts from Great Lakes shipwrecks “are sold under the table and not through online services” such as eBay.

And John Davis, a Huron-Manistee archeologist, said, “It’s kind of a hobby thing. Some people express it by collecting old stuff.”

Davis continued: “You have to do a lot of work for a little return” because most people who lived on long-abandoned farms had little money. “Once in a great, great, great while they’ll find a locket or a coin. They’re not finding gold, they’re not finding rare coins, they’re not finding diamond rings.”

In the most recently discovered incident, artifact-hunters dug about 300 holes at the Hemlock Grove Farm site in Wexford County, about 25 miles from Cadillac in the Huron-Manistee, which sprawls for 987,000 acres in the northern Lower Peninsula.

Arbogast said, “This farm, unless you knew it was there and you get off the trail and walked 100 yards and kicked around a while, you probably wouldn’t know it’s there unless you did some historical research,”

Davis said some sites, like Hemlock Grove, “have a lot of stuff on them. The whole gamut of domestic and industrial and disposable artifacts that are durable and preservable are there. It’s in the yard, it’s under the tree, it’s everywhere.”

The theft, now under investigation by the U.S. Forest Service, isn’t the first time looters have sacked historical sites within Michigan’s three vast national forests. Investigators are following up on calls from citizens who saw vehicles near the farm site.

In an even more blatant incident, thieves stole an authentic 16-foot birch bark canoe from a museum display in the Ottawa National Forest visitor center in Watersmeet, in the western Upper Peninsula.

The 2002 crime remains unsolved.

Ottawa public affairs officer Lisa Klaus said thefts aren’t as significant a problem in the nearly 1 million-acre Ottawa as in some other national forests because of its relative remoteness.

“We also caution visitors that we have a lot of historical sites, logging camps, mining areas, a lot of tribal sites we try to protect,” she said.

State-owned public lands are vulnerable as well, especially on the 3.8 million acres of forestland.

“It’s difficult to quantify because there are so many places, particularly in the state forests,” state archeologist John Halsey said. “There’s very little control we can exert over it.

“It’s theft of state property at its simplest level. People think if it’s on state land, `it belongs to me,’ Halsey said. “If you’re going to do archeology or artifact recovery on state land, you have to do it on a permit.”

Some thieves have their eye on underwater treasures—artifacts from an untold number of shipwrecks within Michigan’s 11 Great Lakes preserves that cover 2,450 square miles.

“There’s always stuff disappearing off shipwrecks—it’s more accessible and visible,” Halsey said. “We do occasionally hear about these things, and conscientious divers do report when something is missing, but you almost have to catch people in the act to make a prosecution stick.”

Lt. Dave Davis of the Department of Natural Resources’ law enforcement division recalled the case of a sports diver who had looted a wreck in the Straits of Mackinac that connects lakes Huron and Michigan. The diver’s wife ratted him out during a divorce, and the investigation led to recovery of artifacts, a criminal conviction and a fine.

The difficulty in safeguarding artifacts is evident.

For example, the joint federal-state Thunder Bay National Maritime Preserve in Lake Huron alone has at least 50 of the known 1,500 shipwrecks in Michigan waters.

“There’s no sign-in sheet at shipwrecks. We don’t know who’s been there,” Dave Davis said.

And John Davis said the Huron-Manistee National Forest has about 2,000 known historic sites—“logging camps, Civilian Conservation Corps period camps, schools, grange halls, breweries, the whole gamut of late 19th century and early 20th century buildings. Those public ownerships are islands of preservation. Those on other lands are generally not protected.”

Hiawatha’s Franzen said archeological information is valuable in helping the public understand the past, and the looting of artifacts damages sites destroys information that “is not in the history books, not in the archives.

“Even loggers, trappers, homesteaders—all they have left behind is this material record” – that can be used to understand their food, their lifestyles and “their adaptability to life on the frontier up here.”