A Smithsonian magazine special report
Revolutionary War-Era Gunboat Found Underneath World Trade Center Wreckage Finds a Permanent Home in Upstate New York
Researchers are reassembling the ship, which was likely built in the 1770s near Philadelphia
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In 2010, construction crews working in Lower Manhattan found the remains of a Revolutionary War-era gunboat buried deep underground. Now, after years of restoration work, the 18th-century vessel has found a new permanent home at the New York State Museum in Albany.
“New York stood at the epicenter of our fight for freedom, and this gunboat is a physical reminder of that courage and grit,” says Devin Lander, New York’s state historian, in a museum statement. “To watch it rise again, plank by plank, is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness the intersection of archaeology, storytelling and national identity. ”
The vessel was discovered at “Ground Zero,” the site where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Workers were building the new World Trade Center when they discovered the vessel under roughly 22 feet of oxygen-poor landfill sediment, which had preserved it for centuries.
Archaeologists had just two weeks to excavate as much of the ship—nicknamed the Ground Zero Gunboat—as they could. In the end, they were able to extract roughly 30 feet of the 50-foot vessel and more than 1,000 artifacts, per Gothamist’s Jon Campbell.
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Ever since then, conservators at Texas A&M University’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation have been carefully preserving the vessel. Some researchers soaked its roughly 600 wooden planks in water to help remove the salt that had been embedded centuries earlier, while others removed and cleaned all of its iron nails.
They also scanned each piece of timber to create a detailed, 3D model of the vessel, reports the Times Union’s Katherine Kiessling. When it came time to ship the vessel back to New York, researchers freeze-dried each piece of wood to remove any remaining moisture. In the end, this process extracted roughly 5,000 pounds of liquid from the planks.
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Historians, meanwhile, have also been piecing together the history of the rare, American-built gunboat. A dendrochronological analysis of the ship’s timber suggests it was built from old-growth trees that were harvested in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1770s. Wood that was harvested from the same area around the same time was also used to build Independence Hall and other Revolutionary-era buildings in Philadelphia.
The gunboat was built quickly using iron nails and fasteners, which later oxidized in the water. Archaeologists also found wood-eating shipworms called teredos, which suggests the vessel had sailed through the waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean—and may even have traveled as far south as the Caribbean. The hull’s shape, meanwhile, suggests it was made to patrol shallow waters.
“If it is what we think it was, it was used in the American Revolution to defend the Delaware Bay and Delaware River from the British,” says Peter Fix, a watercraft conservator at Texas A&M University, to WRGB’s Emma Quinn. “If these [gunboats] weren't here … things may have turned out differently.”
A pewter button found in the vessel suggests British forces may have captured it at some point, possibly during the fall of Philadelphia in 1777. The button was inscribed with the number 52, which researchers think indicates it once belonged to a member of the British Army’s 52nd Regiment of Foot.
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But what happened to the gunboat after that—including how it made its way to Lower Manhattan—remains somewhat of a mystery. One suggestion posits that the ship was buried as garbage, essentially, at some point between 1790 and 1818, as part of efforts to expand Lower Manhattan into the Hudson River.
The vessel arrived at the New York State Museum in pieces. Now, researchers are in the process of re-assembling it for an upcoming exhibition on the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. They hope to have the gunboat completely reconstructed by the end of June.
In the meantime, museum-goers are invited to watch them work.
“It’s a boat,” Fix tells the Times Union. “Boats are huge magnets, and people just want to be part of them. I find they’re great portals to be an opening spot to talk about so many different types of history and science and more.”
