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NPS Form 10-900-a (Rev. 8-86) Wisconsin Word Processing Format (Approved 3/87) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Schooner-barge PRETORIA Section 8 Page 16 Ashland County, WI in design than, and superior in construction to, the coal schooners. Despite being built of much lighter scantlings, the largest Davidson schooner-barges were longer, narrower in beam, and of shallower draft than the coal schooners; they carried comparable-sized cargoes and, as a class, enjoyed much longer lifespans. Of the seven Davidson-built schooner-barges that exceeded 300 feet in length, only the Pretoria, caught in a terrible spot in one the most devastating storms in modern Great Lakes history, sank when relatively new. Three others, the Santiago, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga, had respectable careers for wooden ships, lasting between nineteen and twenty-seven years before their loss. Three out of four of the final schooner-barges produced by Davidson, including the Montezuma and the Chieftain, the longest wooden schooner hulls ever built in the United States, survived nearly three decades of hard service before abandonment in the Saginaw River (Swayze 1991:107-108). Davidson's unpowered giants represent the final phase in the development of the Great Lakes schooner-barge. While the first schooner-barges were mostly former fully-rigged schooners with their running gear cut down to allow for larger deck loads and operation by smaller crews, by the mid-188Os almost all large schooners launched from Great Lakes yards were, in fact, designed as schooner-barges. Between 1885 and 1894, the Davidson yard built eighteen moderate-sized schooner-barges--most geared toward the lumber trade (MVUS 1894, 1901, 1902; Van der Linden 1979:355; Ralph K. Roberts 1992, pers. comm.). The giant Davidson schooner-barges, first appearing in 1895, were an extension of the consort system as envisioned by the creators of the R.J. Hackett and her specially designed consort, the Forest City. In that respect they were similar to a contemporary class of lake craft that enjoyed genuine, but short-term, success on the Great Lakes: the steel whalebacks designed by Alexander McDougall and built by his American Steel Barge Company of Superior, Wisconsin. The giant schooner-barges operated in tandem with Davidson steamers offered cargo capacities comparable to the most modern steel ships of the 1890s and early 1900s and could be built at the Bay City yard for much less money. For example, the steamer Venezuela, built in 1898, and her consort, the schooner-barge Pretoria, built