Jersey Shore: a 19th century ship?

Jacqueline L. Urgo has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a local shipwreck:

The remains of a shipwreck buried beneath twenty feet of sand (photo), recently unearthed by crews rebuilding a seawall in the Normandy Beach section of the Ocean County municipality of Brick Township, New Jersey, may be a historically significant treasure.
State archeologists will seek to determine whether a pile of timbers and a wooden, barrel-shaped windlass uncovered as workers tried to pound a steel beam into the sand (breaking the pile-driving equipment twice) are pieces of the nineteenth-century ship Ayreshire. The wooden coal-hauling and passenger vessel, carrying two hundred people, ran aground off Squan Beach during a howling snowstorm in January of 1850.
The Ayreshire, carrying British immigrants, is among an estimated seventy-two hundred ships wrecked off New Jersey's coastline since the 1600s, making the area one of the most dangerous passages on the planet, according to experts. Though shoals and other geographic and weather-related peculiarities along the coastline likely contributed to the high number of shipwrecks, there is historical evidence of a practice along the coast called wrecking, where thieves would lure ships close to the shoreline and run them aground by using a lantern tied to a mule to mimic a lighthouse and the safe passage it offered seafarers. They would then salvage the cargo that would wash ashore.
"I don't think many people realize just how dangerous the New Jersey coastline was for passing ships. Shipwrecks were a common occurrence," said Dan Lieb, director of the New Jersey Historical Divers Association, a shipwreck and maritime history preservation group in Wall Township.
The find would be historically important, because the Ayreshire wreck marked the first successful rescue of all but one aboard with Joseph Francis' life-car, an enclosed metal capsule that could hold up to five people that was moved from shore to ship and back on something like a clothesline.
The Ayreshire's only casualty was a father who tried to jump from the sinking vessel onto the life-car as his two children were being taken to safety; he fell into the icy water and drowned.
The rescue operation was performed by members of the Chadwicks Life Saving Station; such stations dotted the shoreline and were a precursor to the modern-day rescue functions of the Coast Guard. According to written accounts at the time, the Ayreshire was stranded just offshore from the life-saving station, and crews were able to get to the vessel quickly and retrieve those aboard.
"If it is the Ayreshire, it will be a large artifact that will help us tell the story of early life-saving measures in a place where there are very few tangible artifacts," Lieb said. He said it was likely a definitive determination could be made whether the debris was from the Ayreshire or another vessel, perhaps the Cornelius Grinnell, which ran aground at Squan Beach within three years of the Ayreshire's grounding.
Joseph Pawlowicz, the Brick Township deputy emergency management officer, said workers trying to complete the seawall, which runs from neighboring Mantoloking through Brick Township and into Toms River along Route 35, had not been held up by the discovery, and were "kind of working around" the two-hundred-foot area along the Seventh Avenue beach where the wreck was found. "We're told the state will use penetrating radar to determine whether there is any more of the ship beneath the sand," Pawlowicz said. "If there is, that material will also have to be excavated."
Just how the huge pile of ancient debris came to be buried beneath the sand so close to the shoreline is being debated among experts and townspeople. Some contend Hurricane Sandy's ferocity, particularly along this section of coastline, where whole neighborhoods were washed out to sea, pulled the debris onto the beach, where it became buried in sand.
But others, like Lieb, contend the wooden hulk has been sitting for more than a hundred years right where it was found. "There's some published evidence from the time that the hulls of shipwrecks when they washed ashore were just left where they ended up," Lieb said. "We came across a newspaper article from 1878 that said people would walk among the timbers of the Ayreshire as it lay on the beach. After that vessel wrecked, it didn't go away. It was cast ashore, and that's where it may have remained all these years."
Lieb said researchers may be able to definitively determine whether the remains are of the Ayreshire by comparing shipbuilding records of the time to the precise size of the timbers and windlass that were found. The windlass, a device used on sailing vessels for more than three hundred years, was in the bow of the ship and was used to raise the anchor or pull in the heavy lines.
Bob Considine, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said that work by a marine archeologist had not yet started at the site, but that construction crews were being permitted to continue to work around the cordoned-off area installing the steel sheets for the seawall.

Rico says wrecks are rare and valuable objects; it's good that this one is being handled properly...