I think if you do a little more research you will find your description is bit inaccurate regarding "live oak". Live oak was used for and at the time was indispensable for the construction of a ships timber frame or skeleton. Most importantly the "knees" as they are called, the large slabs of timber that secure the frame timbers at the points where they meet deck timbers at 90 degrees. These large slabs are cut from the live oak trees at the places where their large low hanging branches meet the very large tree's trunk. Only in those naturally occurring sections of a live oak are where grain and fiber of the wood is aligned to form the very strong L shaped knees. The long branches can also be hewn into timber sections that make up the ships frames and the branch sections could be used for sections if the frame and ribbing in the complex bow and stern areas. Live oak because of the way they grow do not produce log sections that are very suitable for being milled into planking, the grow with their grain and fibers too twisted and curving rather than the longer straighter grained fibers needed for planking that needs to move in concert with all it nearby planking as a uniform outer sheath of a shop's hull. Live oak planks even if they where cut would be too short, too thin, and too prone to twisting and corkscrewing along the lines of their fibers.

The live oak knees, butts, and braces can be sawn and hewn to take great advantage of their natural strengths of the wood's grain and fiber. Hull planking needs to be long wide and straight of grain and fiber so that when the planks that make up the sheathing and usually on a ship there will be a couple layers oriented on different directions it acts as a large uniform entity.

Most people have no appreciation of the forces at play in a ship the size of the USS Constitution where it's frame and hull are in tension with it's rigging under enormous pressure from it's vast sail area, and they you throw in the fact that all those elements under tension and pressure are driving the entire undersea structure through the dense medium that the water is. It's why they often speak of a ship as being alive, and they truly are!

I've had the opportunity to observe the building of the Spirit of Massachusetts and before that as a young guy worked rebuilding quite a few large wooden commercial fishing boats as well a a couple the smaller(100 ton) schooners that ply the summer tourist excursion business in New England. I also participated in the building to the Rose Dorthea, a 66' long scale model of a Grand Banks fishing schooner that was the privately constructed labor of love by Santos Flyer the then third generation owner of Flyer's Boat Yard in Province town MA. The original Rose Dorthea was the winner of the then famous 1907 Fishermans Race-Lipton Cup Race staked by Sir Thomas Lipton of tea fame, which raced from Provincetown to Gloucester to Boston where even though a top section of the mast broke the Portuguese crew from P-Town won anyway! It's still remembered as a great source of local pride in what's left of that Portuguese fishing community. If any one ever gets to Provincetown the scale model is housed in what has now become the P-Town Public Library with the Rose Dorthea housed upstairs as is the silver 1907 Lipton Cup trophy, (the trophy cup was awarded to the Rose Dorthea's Provincetown Captain Marion Perry and crew by then Boston Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzpatrick, Sweaty Teddy's grandfather, Rose Kennedy's father) If you have any interest in schooners, cod fishing and that part of US history it's a fantastic exhibit.

Photos for Provincetown Library | Yelp

Town of Provincetown, MA - Official Website - Lipton Cup

File:Rose Dorothea-Lipton's Cup-1907 Fishermen's Race.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When I was a kid you could travel along the Maine coast and see probably a couple hundred of the large fishing and coasting schooners that lay beached and half sunk rotting away. Great book with schooner stories and info schoonerman, actor, author Sterling Hayden's autobiography Wanderer, book's got a good bit of commie, socialist stuff in it also if you like that!