WATCH: Surprise Discovery Found Under Highlands Home

Highlands, NJ - Construction workers raising a Highlands home made a surprising discovery underneath it Wednesday: A 19th century wooden boat.

Workers made the discovery after they lifted Eileen Scanlon's 5th Street home onto stilts.

The boat is big: 44 feet long and has a flat bottom. It was likely used to move shellfish back and forth to market in the mid- to late 1800s, Russell Card of the Historical Society of Highlands told Patch. The woman's property was likely a dock at one time, he said.

However, Scanlon has another theory about how the boat was used:

“There’s a tale, to be taken with a grain of salt, that they were making moonshine at one of the (nearby) cottages, loading it onto the boat and slipping it out to sea,” she told the APP.

But Card disagrees.

"That boat would have been too slow to move booze," he said. "But they may have used those bungalows to store booze during Prohibition."

The boat will be destroyed. A photo of the boat can be seen above, provided by Card.