Mattapoisett, Massachusetts: Ships for the World's Whaling Fleet
Near Woods Hole, Massachusetts
The sound of hammers never stopped in Mattapoisett during the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, when several shipyards were operating simultaneously along this stretch of Buzzards Bay shore. About four hundred vessels were launched from local yards between seventeen forty and the eighteen seventies, many of them bound for New Bedford's whaling fleet. At peak production, hundreds of men, ship carpenters, blacksmiths, and caulkers, worked the yards.
Local yards sent whaleships to the Pacific and beyond. The Civil War, the Panic of eighteen fifty-seven, and the rise of kerosene lamps together collapsed the market for wooden whaleships, and the yards closed. The quiet village that replaced the banging and the smoke has barely changed since.
