ON BOARD THE LOIS McCLURE (AP) – With a push from a tugboat and a nudge from its crew, the Lois McClure, an 88-foot full-scale replica of a 19th-century lake freighter, set out Thursday on a voyage to New York City and back.

Facing a stiff south wind there was no way the McClure could raise its sails for its first day’s journey to Basin Harbor and The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. So it was pulled by the tugboat C.L. Churchill, a restored tugboat donated to the museum by the Shelburne Shipyard.

The McClure was launched last year by the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum after three years of construction in a shed on the Burlington waterfront.

“The boat overwhelms us in its ability to engage the visiting public in the maritime history of our region,” said Art Cohn, executive director of the Maritime Museum.

The McClure is as historically accurate as possible while still meeting modern safety requirements. For example, the deck of the McClure is surrounded by safety railing that was not found on the originals; there are also fire extinguishers and electricity aboard.

The McClure will leave the Maritime Museum next Wednesday and cross Lake Champlain to Essex, N.Y., where it will spend four days as it makes its way south. The schooner is due to dock at the South Street Seaport in New York City on Aug. 16. It will spend about a month in the New York City area before it returns to Lake Champlain at the end of October.

Cohn expects the McClure will be visited by 60,000 people.

Last year, after the McClure was launched and outfitted, the boat toured Lake Champlain, stopping at ports on the Vermont and New York sides, giving visitors insight into what life was like on the lake a century ago.

“The people were so grateful,” Cohn said.

The canal schooners were developed in the 1820s after the opening of the barge canal between Lake Champlain and the Hudson River.

The McClure, copied from two wrecks found off the Burlington waterfront, was a Lake Champlain adaptation of the canal boats that were designed to be pulled through the canals. The McClure is equipped with sails and a centerboard that can be raised and lowered, enabling it to pass through the shallow canals and to sail against the wind.

By the late 19th century vessels hundreds of similar freighters worked the lake, traveling as far south as New York City. They would carry raw materials like timber and marble out of the Champlain Valley while bringing back things like coal and manufactured goods.

Families lived on board. The living quarters were heated with wood or coal. The canal schooners were so common that no one noticed or cared as they rotted away or were abandoned, replaced, first by trains and then by trucks.

Cohn estimated the last commercial cargo was carried in a canal schooner during the 1930s.