Jacob Parr puts on a pair of work gloves and walks around to the backyard of his Chesapeake home, heading straight for a kiddie pool next to the back fence.
From afar, it doesn’t look like much.
But when Parr walks over, he reaches into the pool and lifts out a long, skinny anchor, covered in rust. For perhaps 300-odd years, the anchor likely lay in a Suffolk waterway, gathering corroding salt — but no attention.
That was until Parr, a 27-year-old hobbyist, recently found it using nothing more than a magnet on a rope. Now, Virginia archaeologists are interested in preserving the anchor and learning more about how it fits in with the region’s maritime history — including a “ghost fleet” of ships they were already studying just a few hundred feet away.
