The Age of Sail, Maine's Shipbuilding Century

Bath, Maine sits on the Kennebec River some miles up the river from the sea, close enough to smell the salt on a southwest wind. For more than a century and a half, beginning in the early eighteen hundreds, the banks of the Kennebec and dozens of other Maine rivers produced more sailing ships than almost anywhere else in the United States. At the industry's peak in the eighteen fifties, Maine built a very large share of all American sailing ships, by some estimates as many as one in three. The number is almost impossible to hold in the mind: a large part of an entire country's merchant fleet coming from this one state.

Maine's shipbuilding advantage was timber. The forests that covered the state contained white oak for frames, white pine for masts, and pitch pine for planking, all in quantities and sizes that had largely been logged out of the coastal forests farther south. Maine rivers ran fast and straight to the sea, making it easy to float logs down to the yards. Communities up and down the coast, from Kittery at the New Hampshire border to Eastport near Canada, organized their economies around the building, launching, and provisioning of ships.

The great names in American maritime commerce ran through Maine. The Bath shipyards produced clipper ships that raced tea from China to London. Percy and Small, one of the largest wooden shipbuilding firms in the country, launched six-masted schooners from Bath that were among the largest wooden vessels ever built. The Sewall family of Bath owned one of the most important fleets in the Atlantic trade.

The transition from wood to steel in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties effectively ended the age of the Maine wooden shipyard. Steel required capital and industrial infrastructure that the river-mouth yards could not match. Bath Iron Works, founded in eighteen eighty-four, made the transition to iron and steel and survived; it builds naval vessels today, continuing a tradition of Kennebec shipbuilding that runs unbroken back to the pinnace Virginia, built by George Popham's stranded colonists in the winter of sixteen oh seven.