As a historian of the War of 1812 on the Great Lakes, which involved warships ranging anywhere from small converted merchant sloops to 120-gun first rate men of war (all built and stuck on Lake Ontario or the upper Lakes), it's interesting to note how versatile shipbuilding was during the age of sail. Technically, a shipwright could set up shop wherever there was a nicely sloping shore and access to timber. Most of his iron was shipped in and forged on site. Timbers in the virgin forest of the Great Lakes frontier were relatively simple to find, although in times of war the ships were built of green, unseasoned timber. This 1950 pamphlet contains many more details than I can mention here: https://archive.org/details/buildingofperrys00rose The ships built at Erie, PA could range throughout Lake Erie, Huron, and Michigan; even bigger warships built on Lake Ontario were stuck on that lake, since this was decades before canals allowed navigation between the lakes and the oceans. In 1814, the Royal Navy even shipped a prefabricated frigate overland to reinforce its squadron on Ontario--but there was never a great battle to decide the arms race there and all the warships ended up rotting in ordinary after the war.