CORONET (Wooden Hull Schooner Yacht) National Register of Historic Places Listing

In 1885, Rufus T. Bush wanted to dominate the Atlantic. He built a giant. The Brooklyn shipyard of C. & R. Poillon laid down the keel for a 131-foot wooden hull schooner yacht named Coronet. She was no delicate racing machine. William Townsend designed her with a massive draft, frames of white oak, and thick yellow pine planking. Below deck, she looked like a Gilded Age parlor. Mahogany paneling, marble sideboards, stained glass skylights, and even a miniature piano filled her saloon. Wealthy Victorians loved luxury. But they also loved showing off, so Bush immediately put her to the test.

In March 1887, Coronet faced the yacht Dauntless in a brutal transatlantic match race. They bet $10,000. Winds screamed at gale force, shredding sails and washing crewmen across the freezing decks, but Coronet pushed through the icy March swells to win in just under fifteen days. She became an instant legend. Later, she became the first American yacht to round Cape Horn, carrying her owner on a global cruise. Then, her story took a strange turn in 1905. A fringe religious sect called "The Kingdom" purchased the vessel to use for global missionary work. They kept her remarkably intact, barely changing a thing inside. For nearly a century, these religious zealots lived aboard, inadvertently preserving a floating time capsule that otherwise would have rotted away in some forgotten boatyard.

Her listing on the National Register in Newport County stems from this bizarre, near-perfect preservation. She is one of the last grand Gilded Age wooden yachts left on Earth. When she arrived at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, her structural timbers were weary, though her soul remained stubbornly intact. Shipwrights cataloged her. They began a painstaking, multi-decade restoration process, dismantling her piece by piece to document how 19th-century shipbuilders fastened massive oak frames with copper drift bolts. Actually, she represents more than just old money. She showcases the absolute peak of American wooden shipbuilding before steel and steam took over. A true survivor.