CALAIS – Jean Flahive is on a mission, and she wants a ship.

Not just any ship. She wants a two-, three- or even a four-masted schooner, 60 to 80 feet long.

It doesn’t have to be seaworthy, and she will figure out how to get the ship delivered, whether by land or sea.

The project director for the proposed Down East Heritage Center believes the ship will augment what is already an ambitious project: to build a $6 million heritage center downtown in time for the 400th anniversary of the French settlement of St. Croix Island.

“Our building design plan calls for approximately a three-masted schooner,” she said. “We felt that would be a wonderful attraction.”

Flahive said having a ship on the banks of the St. Croix River would help recapture shipbuilding history. “There are so many people unaware that this area was quite a shipbuilding hub,” she said.

For the past decade, residents have watched as many businesses have closed. Planners hope the heritage center on the St. Croix will draw as many as 90,000 tourists to the area each year and pump some dollars into local businesses. Part of that draw would be a fully restored ship sitting on the riverbank.

The educational and interpretive heritage center would house exhibits and programs on the natural wonders and cultural heritage of the area. It would tell the story of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and of the Machias and St. Croix River valleys. It also would focus on St. Croix Island, where in 1604 the first French colony in North America was established.

The facility also would showcase the environment, including the forests, blueberry barrens and tidal shores of the Bay of Fundy and house artifacts of the fishing industry, including fishing weirs, smokehouses, shipping, logging and quarrying and shipbuilding.

Flahive has done her research.

“After 1850, some excellent ships were launched on the Maine side of the St. Croix,” wrote Harold A. Davis in his book “An International Community on the St. Croix.”

The St. Croix River separates Calais from its neighbor St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Davis describes the intense activity along the river with shipyards dotting both sides and ships being launched in Calais and St. Stephen.

According to Davis, in 1853, the Porter brothers of St. Stephen launched the Break O’Day, a 1,762-ton schooner, from Calais. “This was a truly international project,” he wrote. Ships were used to move products including lumber up and down the coast.

But not all ships were built for transporting goods; some were built to move people. Davis wrote that brothers William and Owen Hinds built the clipper Arabian, which was later outfitted as a “slaver” ship and renamed the Caribbee.

Gail Wahl, who is working with Flahive, said that the two communities at one time had 32 wharves.

Flahive said Ralph Stanley, a master boat builder from Southwest Harbor, has offered to serve as consultant. He has built or restored numerous wooden boats, ranging from lobster boats to racing sloops to yachts.

She also has enlisted the help of what is known locally as the boat school in Eastport.

Bret Blanchard, chairman of the marine technology department at Washington County Technical College at Eastport, has agreed that his students, as part of their classroom activities, will help restore a ship.

“So we have some wonderful offers of support, and now we are really looking for a schooner. We are going to be going up and down the coast of Maine and Canada,” she said.

Flahive said she hopes to find a ship in need of repair. She said often an owner undertakes an ambitious ship-renovation project, then abandons the work when it becomes too costly.

Once restored, the ship could serve as an exhibit, showing how lumber and other cargo were loaded and how the ships were used in trade, she said.

She said the heritage center organizers had no plans to make the ship a floating vessel. “In all likelihood, we will have it permanently cradled and attached to the heritage center by a false wharf,” she said.

Wahl said she was exploring possible granting agencies that might assist.

“But we also hope,” Flahive said, “that there is somebody out there who has a schooner that is going to crumble if it is not preserved … something we could actually transport here,” she said.

Flahive may be reached at 454-7878.