Emma C. Berry: Last of the Noank Smacks

The Emma C. Berry, built in Noank, Connecticut, in eighteen sixty-six, is one of the oldest surviving American commercial vessels. She was a well-smack sloop, a type built with a seawater tank in the hull that kept the catch alive on the way to market, the refrigeration of her era.

For decades she worked the inshore fisheries of southern New England. She later hauled cargo along the Maine coast before falling into disrepair. A yacht basin owner named Slade Dale bought and restored her in nineteen thirty-one, and he donated her to Mystic Seaport in nineteen sixty-nine, where she was restored again.

She now rests at the museum's dock just a few miles from the Connecticut yard where she was born, the last physical survivor of an entire class of working boats that once crowded the Sound.