Pretoria was a giant American schooner barge built for Great Lakes cargo trade and launched in 1900 at West Bay City, Michigan, where she was hailed as the largest wooden boat ever built. Her massive wooden hull required extensive steel reinforcement and even a donkey engine to power a pump that kept her dry, underscoring the challenges of building wooden ships at such scale. Designed to carry huge bulk loads, she had only a brief career. After loading at Superior, Wisconsin, she was lost in a gale near the Apostle Islands in 1905. Her Lake Superior wreck endures as an archaeological site and a symbol of both ambition and limitation in large wooden shipbuilding.