Sunken Revolutionary War boat being rebuilt 15 years after crews found it digging at 9/11 site

12News Arizona ^ | June 25, 2025 | MICHAEL HILL

[fidelis]

NEW YORK — Workers digging at Manhattan's World Trade Center site 15 years ago made an improbable discovery: sodden timbers from a boat built during the Revolutionary War that had been buried more than two centuries earlier.

Now, over 600 pieces from the 50-foot (15-meter) vessel are being painstakingly put back together at the New York State Museum. After years on the water and centuries underground, the boat is becoming a museum exhibit.

Arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes before reconstruction could even begin.

Though researchers believe the ship was a gunboat built in 1775 to defend Philadelphia, they still don’t know all the places it traveled to or why it ended up apparently neglected along the Manhattan shore before ending up in a landfill around the 1790s.

“The public can come and contemplate the mysteries around this ship,” said Michael Lucas, the museum’s curator of historical archaeology. “Because like anything from the past, we have pieces of information. We don’t have the whole story.”

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TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: ageofsail; archeology; godsgravesglyphs; history; nautical; newyork; newyorkcity; worldtradecenter

[Red Badger]

PinGGG!........

[Dr. Franklin]

Dunno. It sailed to NYC. While docked there they learned the timbers were rotten beyond repair. It sank where it was moored and they filled the wharf in latter to build a warehouse or something. Now, we dug it out and found it. Mystery solved.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

What a headline!

“..found it digging at 9/11 site”

They found the boat digging at the site?

[SmokingJoe]

The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was to settle the terms for the end of WW I.
Wilson US, Clemenceau France, Lloyd George UK led the conference.
By the end of it, the Germans were forced to accept these terrible terms whereby Germany gave up big chunks of Germany, gave up all German colonies like Namibia, and Germany was forced to pay these reparations a lot of it to France.
These conditions essentially guaranteed the Germans would go into ear again.
No country was going to tolerate paying such high reparations to other countries at the expense of their own people for long without rebelling.
The Germans initially REFUSED to sign such a suicidal deal, leading to those officials losing power.
The replacing German government signed the bad deal after talking to the German military who told them the German military were not in a position to fight another long sustained war there and then.

Going forward to post WW II, basically America saved Europe after WW II by bringing in the Marshal Aid with hugs amounts of aid sent to help Europe rebuild, so helping Europe to avoid demand huge reparations from Germany again.
Europe owes a lot to America.

[SmokingJoe]

Posted in wrong thread.
Apologies.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor, research assistants and volunteers recently spent weeks cleaning the timbers with picks and brushes

Then the story says that the research assistants and volunteers were arrayed like giant puzzle pieces on the museum floor.

TV station journalists. Gotta love 'em.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

LOL...another one! Two in one article. I missed the one you caught.

And to think they go to J-School to learn to write like that.

[logi_cal869]

Informative video here, but I was hoping for more pics.

https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibitions/gunboat-at-ground-zero

[SunkenCiv]

• Mamdani Vows To Knock Down World Trade Center To Build More Affordable Housing [06/25/2025]

[sopo]

Pennsylvania Navy blocked the Delaware below Philadelphia in 1777 after Howe had defeated Washington at Brandywine and occupied the capital. (Franklin (paraphrase): Howe believes he has taken Philadelphia, but he will find Philadelphia has taken him.”) They had notable success with a chain across the Delaware and cheveaux de frise, some kind of sunken device meant to deter the progress of ships up the river. Fort Mifflin, just offshore from Philly airport now, held out against the British fleet and land bombardment for a couple of weeks to prevent re-supply of the occupiers. Only on November 15 the last possible few days before the river would ice over in those days did the British cannonade reduce Fort Mifflin and allow the passage of the fleet, the Pennsylvania navy was largely scuttled. Joseph Plum Martin was among the last of the defenders to evacuate Fort Mifflin as the British landed on the island. He’d seen many comrades beheaded by cannonballs.

[fidelis]

Thank! I’ll save them for future viewing.

[Larry Lucido]

Lesson to be learned: Don’t break down in Manhattan for any reason!

[Pilsner]

The problem with the Treaty of Versailles was that it tried to compromise an either, or, situation. It was far too harsh for the Germans to accept with good will, and not nearly harsh enough for them to resign themselves to it, as they did after WW2, under extraordinarily more harsh circumstances.