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New Details Emerge About the History of the World Trade Center Boat

By Julie Shapiro | July 29, 2010 12:55pm | Updated on July 30, 2010 12:05am

By Julie Shapiro

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER MANHATTAN — As archaeologists dismantle the 18th-century boat found at the World Trade Center site, new details about its past life have emerged

The boat was likely a two-masted brigantine that traveled the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to the West Indies, spearheading the trade that boosted New York’s fledgling economy at the end of the 18th century, said Warren Riess, a professor at the University of Maine who is overseeing the project.

The 60-foot boat likely ferried grain, vegetables and livestock down to Barbados, returning with sugar, molasses and rum.

“It’s one of the ships that helped build New York,” Riess said Thursday morning at a meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. “From a historical and archaeological point of view, this ship is one of a kind.”

Archaeologists removed the keelson on Wednesday.
Archaeologists removed the keelson on Wednesday.
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AKRF

Few records exist for small, merchant ships like this one, because they were considered too mundane to record, Riess said.

“You’re not going to find a drawing of this in a book,” he said. “Every one is different.”

When archaeologists removed the “ceiling plank,” or floor, of the boat on Tuesday, they found many artifacts that likely belonged to the men who built the vessel. The artifacts included a well-used clay bowl of a pipe.

Once the ceiling plank was gone, the ship’s ribs were laid bare, joined by a 13-foot, 500-pound beam called a “keelson,” which served as the boat’s spine. Workers removed the keelson and the ribs yesterday and are now down to the outer layer of the boat, which they expect to finish dismantling by Friday afternoon.

Before disturbing a single timber on the boat, Riess documented it extensively in writing, photos, video and even a laser scan that is accurate down to 1 millimeter. This information will allow historians to continue studying the boat off site and to eventually piece it back together.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. owns the land just south of Liberty Street where the boat was found and now owns the boat as well. The LMDC has several years to decide what to do with the boat, because that’s how long it will take preservationists to stabilize the worm-eaten wood.

A three-dimmensional panorama of the boat, commissioned by the LMDC, is available here.