Children who visit the Swedish American Museum Center in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood can climb into the newest exhibit—a replica of a wooden 7-foot Viking sled that Norsemen used to haul grain and rocks from farm to farm in the 9th Century.

If they look at the brass plaque on the sled's side, they'll discover this replica wasn't built by professional woodworkers or historians.

The builders were high school students from Pennsylvania's coal country who labored for more than 600 hours to transform a stack of raw lumber into a replica of a sled found amid a Viking burial ship. A similar sled they built is en route to a Viking museum in Iceland.

For students from Minersville Area High School in Minersville, Pa., re-creating medieval treasures has become a tradition. Previous classes built a Viking boat, which the Smithsonian Institution displayed before it went to its permanent home at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, and an English farming cart housed at a museum in Worcester, Mass.

"When I saw what we are able to do, and I think that one sled is heading to you guys in Chicago and another one is going to Iceland . . . well, it's quite amazing, actually," said Adam Saurazas, one of the students who stayed after school for months to build the sled. He's now a student at Penn State University.

The students' mentors, Ned Eisenhuth and Fred Lutkus, traveled to Chicago to ensure that the wooden sled arrived safely Monday morning. For Eisenhuth and Lutkus, finding Nordic museums that will house the sleds is a way to preserve the fruits of their students' labors.

For Karin Moen Abercrombie, executive director of the Swedish American Museum Center, 5211 N. Clark St., the sled is a way of depicting Viking life as something other than a marauding group of men bearing weapons and wreaking havoc.

"It's beautiful," she said as she climbed into the sled and ran her hand over the smooth oak and beech. The sled will be housed in the interactive children's museum, next to a replica of a log cabin where Swedish immigrants lived in 19th Century America and a brightly colored Viking boat.

Minersville High's interest in all things medieval began in the late 1990s, when Eisenhuth, the world cultures teacher, read a magazine article about how Vikings used ships as burial mounds and filled them with objects they could use in the afterlife. The article said Danish Boy Scouts had made a replica of a Viking ship.

"I thought, 'Why don't we try it?' " he said.

Lutkus, the school's woodworking teacher, said he was receptive, though he had never attempted anything on that scale.

They settled on creating a replica of a 21-foot cargo boat found within the Gokstad Ship, a Viking burial site that was excavated in 1880 on the coast of the Oslo Fjord.

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