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Ships & Shipbuilding:
Wooden Boatbuilding |
Though shipbuilding has been an important part of Maine’s economy, wooden boatbuilding has had a longer history, one closely related to shipbuilding. From colonial times, fishermen built their own boats, which included pulling boats (wherries, double-enders now known as peapods, and dories), larger ketch-rigged boats (Hampton boats and small pinkies), sloop boats (Muscongus Bay boats and Friendship sloops), and small schooners.
Any new ship required at least one boat for safety and harbor transportation. All harbors used small boats for getting from shore to a larger vessel. Thus, a boatbuilding business was part of any economy in which there was fishing or shipbuilding. After 1900, small fishing boats began to carry gas engines, including the Camden-built Knox Marine one-cylinder gas engines one-lungers. Eventually, powered lobster boats became a type of their own, and kept the boatbuilding business strong through the years.
The growth of tourism in the second half of the nineteenth century provided a large market for canoes. Maine’s Native American canoe building tradition was successfully converted to mass production when Mainers invented the canvas covered wood canoe in the 1870s. By the early 1900s, businesses like Old Town Canoe built and sold thousands nationally.
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During the same period, Maine summer visitors began racing small sailboats, including creating in 1885 the North Haven dinghy, considered to be the first one-design class in the United States. Many other one-design racing sailboats became popular on the Maine coast, including the Northeast Harbor A boats, the Dark Harbor 17 ½, the Bar Harbor 30, the Wee Scot, and the Mt. Desert Island class. While most were designed by southern New England architects, many were built in Maine. These same architects turned to Maine builders for cruising boats in the decades after World War I.
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Wooden boatbuilding began to see serious competition from fiberglass construction in the 1960s, and the number of wooden boatyards began to decline. Wooden yacht building, though, has made tremendous strides in the last thirty years, as new wood construction technologies and a revival of interest in wooden boats have spurred sales. Maine’s boat builders now make up a 2/3 of a billion dollar industry, building boats in wood, fiberglass, aluminum, and steel.
Maine has a four hundred year history of ship and boat building, and continues to be a world leader.
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