The Brig Niagara Keeps Erie's War of 1812 Story Under Sail

Pennsylvania's official flagship flies its flag from Erie's bayfront. The U.S. Brig Niagara is a reconstructed brig of the kind that fought in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, when Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, after his flagship Lawrence was shattered, transferred to Niagara and carried the American squadron to the victory that secured Lake Erie in the War of 1812.

The modern Niagara is a sailing school vessel as much as a museum piece — a working tall ship that takes trainees and crew out onto the lake it commemorates, then returns to its berth beside the Erie Maritime Museum on the bayfront. Between sailings, visitors board the ship at dockside and tour the museum's exhibits on Perry's fleet, which was built in Erie for the campaign.

The connection between city and ship is structural, not just sentimental: Erie's nickname, the Flagship City, comes from Niagara, and the fleet's construction on Presque Isle Bay is the founding story of Erie as a port. The original Niagara was raised from Misery Bay in 1913, and timbers from it live on in the present vessel.

Even tied up for the season, the brig does its work from the dock — masts and rigging rising over Dobbins Landing, a standing lesson in how much of Erie's history was decided on the water just beyond the piers.

The museum beside the berth fills in the paperwork of that story — shipbuilding on the bay, the squadron's winter in Misery Bay, and the raising of the original brig a century after the battle. School groups from Erie, Millcreek and Harborcreek cycle through each year, which is how the Flagship City renews its name: one class of Erie kids at a time, standing on the deck where the lesson happened.