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Ships & Shipbuilding:
Steam, Steel Ships and an End of Wooden Shipbuilding |
Well before 1900, Bath had become Maine’s shipbuilding center, successfully converting from wooden ship building to metal. Metal working skills grew out of the steam boiler building business and large scale machine shops which hardly existed anywhere else in Maine. Other Maine-built steamers bought engines and boilers from Bath or out of state.
Bath Iron Works prospered, not by building commercial vessels, but by building ships for the U.S. Navy, a tradition that continues. Trying to extend the sailing ship era, Bath’s Sewall shipyard built a few steel sailing ships and barks. The first, in 1894, was the Scottish-designed four-masted bark, Dirigo, named for the Maine State motto. The Sewalls then built other steel sailing ships, particularly for the case oil trade to the Far East. Yet like the Down Easters and the great schooners, they fell out of use in favor of the larger, more reliable steel steamers, most of which were built in Great Britain.
The U.S. Government contracted for construction of a number of large schooners to carry cargo during the First World War. Most were not completed until 1920, after the war was over. A post-war glut of shipping ended most wooden shipbuilding in Maine and elsewhere; however, some shipbuilders continued building wooden vessels. Shipyards that had built large sailing ships and schooners switched to fishing boats, lobster boats, and sardine carriers, most engine-powered. Some commercial schooner construction persisted until about 1940. During the Second World War, there was a fresh flurry of wooden shipbuilding and boatbuilding in the historic shipyards in Camden, Rockland, Thomaston, and East Boothbay. Mine sweepers and a wide range of support vessels, up to 200 feet long, kept wooden shipbuilding skills alive for another generation.
After the war, Maine wooden shipbuilders continued to build smaller fishing, commercial and recreational craft, until these were superseded by steel and fiberglass.
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