The David W. Mills, a typical late 19th-century Great Lakes wooden cargo steambarge, was part of the vast commercial shipping industry that played an important role in the industrial development of the North American interior. Measuring 202 feet by 34 feet and weighing 925 tons, it could carry more than one million board feet of lumber, although it was carrying coal when it ran aground on Ford Shoals in dense smog caused by forest fires in Canada. Efforts to free the vessel failed, and it broke apart during a violent October storm. Its wreck site was later mapped by the Oswego Maritime Foundation, and on May 3, 2000, it became New York State's first Submerged Cultural Preserve and Dive Site in Lake Ontario.