For four days per week in the summertime, the Boatbuilding Program's 16 students and two Program Assistants travel 30 minutes north of the Bronx to Philipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, NY. As they arrive, they step hundreds of years back in time and over the course of the summer, students build a traditional wooden boat as if it were the year 1750. This means dressing in traditional colonial clothing, using all traditional hand tools, and getting used to the occasional sheep, goat, or pair of oxen who come to check out the progress. Of course it is not just curious animals, but people who come check out the work-100s of them over the course of the summer who visit the Philipsburg Manor living history museum. And it is the students' job to interpret their work for museum visitors, explaining their roles as craftspeople and artisans in the context of the site.

Philipsburg Manor is dedicated to telling the story of the community of 23 enslaved individuals of African descent who operated an 18th century milling and trading complex was owned by an Anglo-Dutch family of merchants, the Philipses. In doing so, Philipsburg tells a very different story of the colonial north, one from the perspective of the people responsible for doing the work-the slaves. There is precedent for boatbuilding work being carried out at the site: archeological excavations at Philipsburg in the 1960s revealed a woodworking area adjacent to the northerly side of the mill. Wooden artifacts-including cleats for mooring boats and several wooden ribs used in building sloops-indicate that the area was used for ship and mill repairing activities and perhaps construction of small water craft as well.

Boat designs have included two different graceful river bateaus and a workhorse cargo scow, and have been built from start to finish in six weeks by the students using only hand tools. Three of the four boats created to date have been kept for use at either Philipsburg in Sleepy Hollow or Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson. The most recent boat was built on commission for the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, NY.

Rocking the Boat students wear period clothing traditional to the mid-18th century, including full skirts and petticoats, bonnets or kerchiefs, and stockings for the girls and smocks, neckcloths, and breeches for the boys.

In addition to their boatbuilding tasks, teams of students rotate through four days of programming, learning the craft of coopering buckets and casks, working on projects around the site such as fence building and farming, and participating in an on-water environmental program on the Pocantico River which includes canoeing in the morning and swimming at the local YMCA pool in the afternoon.