The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

bows. She was originally schooner-rigged, with two old-fashioned slip-keels. Her lower masts were buttonwood; the bowsprit and jib- boom of the same timber, both made in one spar; her decks were of red cedar and but very little iron was used in her build, she being mostly fastened with wooden trunnels. She was employed at the close of the war by the United States Government as a transport. In 1815 she was sunk in Scajaquada Creek, but was subsequently raised by Standart & Bidwell and rebuilt into a hermaphrodite brig - removing the slip keels and substituting a standing one instead. By this general overhauling she was made to look much like a sea-going vessel, and when under way, with all her canvas, upper and lower studding sails set to the breeze, her appearance was really quite imposing.18 In 1815 the Schooner General Jackson (fifty tons) was built at Ashtabula by Anon Harmon, who arrived there from Massachusetts in 1810. At this launching, Nelson Hubbard, small son of Matthew Hubbard, the township postmaster, was drowned.19 The same year (1815) the thirty-five-ton schooner Rachel was built at Sandusky, but little is known of her history or her builder. During the winter and spring, 1815, the thirty-five-ton schooner Polly was built by Abijah Hewitt and a Mr. Montgomery. She was built on the north side of the ridge along the lower road to Sandusky, in the northwest corner of Huron Township, Erie County. The builders intended to draw her through a channel in a large marsh, and hence to the lake, but the Spring of 1815 proved to be too wet to make this practical. The Polly remained on the stocks until June, when farmers arrived with forty yoke of oxen to pull her to the lake. Because of the terrain, they had to draw her southeasterly about a mile and a quarter, then north and northeasterly until they reached the property of W. H. Wright, a short distance west of Huron, where they finally launched her into Lake Erie. The entire operation took two days, the farmers coming from Pipe Creek, Bloomingville, and Avery (now Milan).20 Levi Johnson, in 1815, continued his vessel building in Cleveland by launching the sixty-one-ton schooner Neptune. She was built near the site of the Central Market and drawn to the river in the same manner as the Ladies' Master and Pilot earlier.21 The schooner Aurora (thirty-two tons) was built at Huron in 1816, but the only early references concerning her are a newspaper advertisement of her arrival at Painesville in 1819, and her riding out a late October gale successfully in 1820.22 The Wasp (eighteen tons) appeared at Huron in 1817, and Ashtabula launched two vessels, the Elizabeth (ten tons) and Traveller (thirty-five tons). The Elizabeth was lost in a gale on Lake Erie on October 20, 1820, near 12