Texas Seaport Museum and Tall Ship Elissa

She was launched in 1877, built in Aberdeen, Scotland, as a merchant vessel at the moment steamships were making her kind obsolete. The *Elissa* — a three-masted iron barque — traded through multiple flags and names across more than a century before the Galveston Historical Foundation purchased her for $40,000 in 1975 and brought her back. Named a National Historic Landmark in 1990, she still sails, crewed by volunteers, out of the port where Galveston once stood as one of the world's busiest cotton-trading harbors.