SSS Lotus
historic gaff rigged schooner, home port is Sodus Bay, New York, United States
The SSS (Sea Scout Ship) Lotus is a historic gaff rigged schooner. Her home port is Sodus Bay in Wayne County, New York, United States. She is owned and operated by the "Friends of the Schooner Lotus."
History of Lotus
The keel on Lotus was laid down in 1917 and the boat was completed in 1918, in Rocky River, Ohio. Designed by the naval architect William Hand Jr. in 1916, and christened with the name of Miss Gloucester, she was designed as a pleasure yacht for sailing on the Great Lakes.
As Miss Gloucester, she was commissioned by Thomas B. Van Dorn, to be the Van Dorn family yacht. The Van Dorn family sailed her on Lake Erie and perhaps Lake Huron.
In 1922, the ship was sold to Stephen Estes Comstock of Newark, New York. He moved the ship to Sodus Bay, on Lake Ontario, and renamed her Lotus, after the wild water lilies that grew in the bay.
Lotus was sold again in 1938, to Dick Todd and Ken Cooley.
“SSS Lotus” enters the record as historic gaff rigged schooner, home port is Sodus Bay, New York, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lotus, historic and gaff can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“SSS Lotus” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lotus, historic and gaff provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7387286. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1918, 1916 and 1922.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow SSS Lotus primary sources, SSS Lotus archive and Lotus research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “SSS Lotus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.