The remains are thought to be those of the lumber schooner Lottie Cooper, which was lost off Sheboygan during a raging easterly gale on April 9, 1894. The three-masted schooner carried a crew of six, and one crewman and part of her cargo of 230,000 board feet of elm lumber were lost when she sank. Like thousands of similar vessels, she was built in an era when only hand tools were available, using lumber from hundreds of hundred-year-old oak trees and several tons of metal fasteners, and a skilled crew of shipbuilders could build such a ship in three to four months. Typical of nineteenth-century Great Lakes schooners, she testifies to the high craftsmanship of her era's shipbuilders and represents a time when hundreds of vessels worked the dangerous waters of the Great Lakes. In July 1990, before construction of Sheboygan's Harbor Centre Marina, an underwater archaeological survey of the harbor floor identified several targets, and divers found that one was the remains of a wrecked wooden ship. These remains are believed to be the Lottie Cooper based on the size of the wreckage, the hull's clear lumber-schooner configuration, and the location matching the exact site of the Cooper's loss. The wreckage lay in ten to fifteen feet of water just off the present-day boat ramp, was removed when the marina area was dredged, and was placed on display in the summer of 1993. The curved sides were arranged as nearly as possible in their original position to show the ship's massive proportions: the beam, or width, was twenty-seven feet, and about seven feet of the original floor is missing between the keel and the bottoms of the sides. These parts are all that remains of the once beautiful lumber schooner; the rest of the vessel was broken up and destroyed by weather, ice, and time. Such a large recovered artifact is unusual because, although many Great Lakes shipwrecks have been discovered, very few have been recovered. During the 1880s more than 2,000 schooners sailed the Great Lakes carrying cargoes of many kinds, and it is estimated that more than ten thousand ships have been lost there, including some seven hundred on Lake Michigan. Off Sheboygan alone, sixty-one ships have been lost, and fourteen, including the Lottie Cooper, sank in or near the harbor.