The Santa Maria That Sailed Nowhere
Near Columbus, Ohio
In nineteen ninety-one, a full-scale replica of Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, was brought to Columbus, Ohio, and moored on the Scioto River. The attraction opened that fall as the centerpiece of a year-long celebration of the quincentenary of Columbus's fourteen ninety-two voyage. A wooden sailing ship on a landlocked midwestern river, representing a man the city was named after but had not particularly thought hard about until that moment.
The ship floated on the Scioto for two decades. The nonprofit that ran it later closed. In the years after, the Scioto Mile redevelopment project that was transforming the riverbank made the ship's berth untenable. Estimates for the necessary repairs ran into the millions of dollars. The city of Columbus dismantled the ship and moved it to a storage lot on the south side.
It sat there for years.
The ship was billed as a historically accurate replica of the Santa Maria when it was built. Whatever its historical accuracy, it was an odd thing: a monument to a man the city was named after, moored on a river that Columbus the navigator never came within a thousand miles of, celebrating a voyage whose consequences the city had spent two decades learning to argue about more honestly.
