Ice houses in Rockport Harbor provided cold storage until the ice demand increased in the summer time. Sawdust was often used to insulate the ice blocks. Many schooners are laid up for the winter.
The five-masted schooner Harwood Palmer is under construction in this photograph. Here the frames are all up and planking is beginning. Note the iron straps that hold the frames together and strengthen the hull. In the foreground, on the right, there are five masts being shaped. The schooner was built in Waldoboro, Maine in 1904. Schooners like this primarily carried coal from from Virginia to northern cities.
Cross-section of the four-masted schooner Bertha L. Downs, at the main mast, looking forward. This view shows the keel, keelson, frames, planking, ceiling, hanging knees, deck beams, and decking.
Image drawn by Sam Manning for the book The Schooner Bertha L. Downs, written by Basil Greenhill, 1995, p. 68.
This cross-section of the four-masted schooner gives a good idea of the great amount of lumber used to build a ship. Note that many of the timbers are 12" X 12" in section, and that most of the planking is 4" thick and ceiling lumber is 4" to 10" thick! Note how the hanging knee and stanchion provide structural support for the deck beam.
Image drawn by Sam Manning for the book The Schooner Bertha L. Downs, written by Basil Greenhill, 1995, p. 71.
Brailing (pulling in) a mackerel seine from a seine boat alongside the mackerel schooner. The seine is full of fish, which are transferred to the schooner with a dip net.
This was an advertising photograph taken by Albert Cook Church, a Massachusetts photographer.
Photograph from the Atlantic Fisherman collection.
The schooner George W. Wells was the first six-masted schooner built. Here we see a deck view looking toward the bow and Mount Battie in the background.
Old style Grand Bank cod schooner; crew at rail fishing with hand-lines. Mainers without the capital to invest in schooners carrying dories, or dory trawlers, continued to fish these smaller schooners into the late 19th century, after they were obsolete on the Banks.
This image is from G. Brown Goode's The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, 1884-1887, Section V, Plate 23. The book can be found on line at NOAA.
George Wasson, from a Brooksville family of shipbuilders and seafarers, painted and wrote about coastal Maine and the Penobscot Bay in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th. The Museum owns his last boat,Wave Crest, built in Brewer in 1916. This painting's donor's father, Percival Cushman, worked on Wave Crest with Wasson and cruised with him. When Wasson died Cushman inherited the boat and sailed out of Sorrento until boat was given to Frank Hatch who gave it to the Museum.
