Researchers this week unveiled the rotted remains of an 18th century sloop unearthed four years ago at the World Trade Center's ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks that took down the two towers of the World Trade Center, a 32-foot piece of a ship was discovered by excavators in July 2010. It was found 20 feet under a street where a parking garage was being built for the new 1 World Trade Center tower.

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Researchers said the timber used to build this ship came from forests in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1773, around the time of the American Revolutionary War.

Researchers from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory released their new findings in the July issue of the journal,Tree Ring Research. They said the white oak used to build the ship's frame matched that used to build the city's Independence Hall.

Archaelogists carefully dismantled the ship piece by piece. They freeze-dried each plank studied at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory where scientists extracted the tree ring samples.

Edward Cook, a tree ring scientist at Columbia University and head of this research, said the ship is a sloop. He believes it was built at a small shipyard in Philadelphia. 

Cook gathered this scientific information with the use of tree ring dating.

He said that after sailing for a couple of decades, the sloop was scrapped for junk. The sloop's remains were used as a landfill to create more land for the developing city of New York.  

There are plans to house the sailboat at a display in a New York museum.This is the second ship found under Lower Manhattan.

The first one was an 18th-century cargo ship found by archaeologists on Water Street in 1982.

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