Radio Script #549

Little Talks on Common Things

October 28, 1962

Here in Waterville we live forty miles from the nearest seaport, but we are nevertheless interested in the story of Maine’s leadership in the building and manning of ocean-going vessels in the grand days of sail a hundred and more years ago. I have recently reminded you that many sturdy sloops and brigs, even schooners and full-rigged ships, were built on the Kennebec River above Merrymeeting Bay, and that in the early 1800’s no fewer than twenty vessels were built right here in Waterville.

Tonight I want to give you a few facts and some pertinent explanations about the supremacy of Maine shipping in the period from 1845 to 1860, which was certainly the most glorious period of Maine sail.

Long before 1845 Maine had been the birthplace of many ships. When Maine became a separate state in 1820, she had between Kittery and Eastport one sixth of all custom houses in the United States. In 1860, although all the Maine ports accounted for less than one percent of American imports and ports and only three percent of all vessel clearances, nineteen percent, or almost one in every five of all American ships were owned in Maine, and of all American vessels then afloat, one in every four had been built in Maine. In the year 1860 the single port of Bath built more ships than were built in all other Atlantic and Gulf Coast yards combined, from Eastport to Galveston. How did Maine ever get such a lead in the building and operation of ships? What were the factors that led to Maine supremacy?

First, there was Maine geography, or rather topography, the formation of the land along Maine’s seacoast. It is well known that south of Long Island there are few good harbors directly on the coast. Good ports from Philadelphia south were developed mostly up the rivers, or on inland bays. But Maine, where the mountains run right down to the sea, had innumerable natural harbors affording shelter to thousands of ships. On the west coast of Africa there is scarcely a single good harbor. Large ships must be anchored well offshore and both goods and passengers must be carried to land by lighters. Small as Maine is compared to the great continent of Africa, Maine’s seacoast is so indented with bays and harbors, so broken by capes and peninsulas, that, if it were stretched out in a line, the length of Maine’s seacoast would stretch from Cairo to Cape Town on the map of Africa, and have enough left over to reach to the .edge of the Antarctic Ocean.

But Maine’s fine natural harbors would not alone have accounted for ship building, for the building of ships demands ready access to materials. Maine oak and pine grew right down to the edge of the sea. Because of the scarcity of wood in Europe, especially in England, British builders found they could often commission the building of a ship in Maine and sail it across the Atlantic to a British port cheaper than they could build it at home.

We read many romantic yarns about the speed of the old ships and exciting races between shippers. But the solemn truth is that the best Maine ship builders considered speed a luxury. Of course the clippers were famous for their beauty and their speed, but their fashion was short-lived, and they never made money for their owners in comparison to returns from homelier ships. The reason Was that the~sign of the clippers sacrificed cargo to speed, and it was cargo tonnage that brought in the profits. So costly became their operation, in competition with the bigger carriers, that the clippers were finally reduced to carrying Chinese coolies and loads of guano from Peru.

Now why did Maine shipping reach its peak in the fifteen years just before the Civil War? The first reason is the same that caused .the modern political complexion. of the City of Boston — the Irish potato famine of the 1840’s. A sudden booming demand for ships to bring Irish immigrants to America caused frantic building of new ships in every Maine yard. Then in 1846 England repealed the Corn Laws, which had so long restricted the import of grain into the British Isles. That meant that every immigrant ship, bringing starving Irish peasants to America, was assured a return cargo of grain back to Britain. A third reason for this heyday of Maine ships was cotton. Before 1860 cotton manufacture had made only a humble start in the United States. Vast quantities of cotton were shipped from Southern plantations to the sprawling industrial centers of Birmingham and Manchester in England. It was that fact that led the Confederacy to the mistaken belief that England would support the South in our Civil War. In that cotton trade there were two-way cargoes for Maine ships — taking the cotton to England and bringing cotton manufactured goods back to the States.

A fourth reason why the golden age of Maine ships came in the late 40’s and 50’s was the California gold rush. There was suddenly great demand for ships to go around the Horn or to the Isthmus of Panama. The number of men from the Atlantic coastal states who went to California in that period by way of the sea exceeded, probably ten fold, the number who went overland by covered wagon.

Another factor was Maine’s easy access to the fishing banks. In 1850 almost half of the nation’s catch of cod and mackerel was taken in Maine ships. Searsport, of all Maine coastal towns, produced the largest number of sea captains in proportion to the town’s population. In 1860, when most ships were being built at Bath, their skippers were men from Searsport. In that single year the town had 78 sea captains on the ocean at one time.

A big factor in coastwise shipping was the trade in Maine granite. Quarried at .Vinalhav~nf’ at Stonington, along Penobscot Bay and up the river, also at Hallowell, and at other centers, the granite was usually taken on barges to Chebeague Island, where it was reloaded on larger vessels for transportation to New York and points south — wherever the biggest building demand happened to be at the time.

Everyone was proud of Maine’s famous square-riggers, and they lasted much longer than did the clippers. The last Maine square-rigger was built at Phippsburg in 1894. Professor Albion of Harvard, the present foremost historian of Maine shipping, humorously remarks that almost every Maine seacoast family has a captain in their ancestry, but no one ever admits to having had a before-the-mast hand in the family line. Perhaps, says Professor Albion, every one of them was at some time a captain, because no matter how small the boat, its skipper was always called captain. The professor tells of a vice admiral of the U. S. Navy who retired to live in Searsport. The admiral told friends that in Searsport he was always called Mister, because he didn’t own a fishing boat.

Now let us turn from the sea to the land. Do you remember how some roads were marked in the early days of automobile traffic before the time of modern route numbers? Of course there were at first no markings at all, and one had to depend upon such guides as the Automobile Blue Book, with such instructions as “turn left at the watering trough”, or “take next right beyond the white church”.

In September, 1919, 44 years ago, the Boston Post published an item about what it called the blazing of highways in Maine. The article said: “Important changes have been made in the color banding of poles throughout Kaine. Ever since March a crew has been on the road carefully marking the state from Calais to Kittery, and from the Atlantic seaboard to a point running east and west well above the northern line of heaviest population. The most important changes have been in renaming the routes. One new name is the Theodore Roosevelt highway out of Portland. It runs from Longfellow Square to Morrill’s Corner, past Riverton Park to North Windham, and thence through South Casco, Raymond, Naples, Bridgton and Fryeburg to the New Hampshire line. The marking is decidedly striking — a bright red band, flanked top and bottom by narrower white bands, with the initials TR standing out boldly  in white on the red field.

“The route running from Portland to Gray, Poland Spring, Norway, South Paris, Bryants’ Pond and Bethel to Gorham, N.H. is named the Longfellow Highway, but its green and white markings, placed when it was called the Pine Tree Way, remain unchanged.

“At Gray starts the Capital Way to Augusta through Auburn, Lewiston and Winthrop. A new route from Augusta to Belfast, through Palermo and Liberty, is called the Kennebec-Penobscot Trail.

“The idea of banding part way around the poles, as is done in some other states, has not worked well in Maine, so the Maine markings go all the way around.”

It is interesting to us in Central Maine to know that the contract for that marking job allover the state was held by A. A. Moady of Oakland. He used the finest quality of paint, but even at that had difficulty. making the paint stick to some of the old rotting poles. “Mr. Moody encountered some trouble from boys disfiguring the bands while the paint was still fresh, necessitating a repainting job, but by working steadily from daylight to dark, and despite long stretches of rainy weather, Mr. Moody finished his job before September first, according to contract.

The same issue of the Boston Post that contained the article on marking the highways contained another item of interest to people in Fairfield. In that year 1919 at the close of World War I, a Fairfield man retired after 65 years of service with the railroad. He was Abner Ward who in 1854 had started work on the old Portland and Kennebec R.R., the line that then came no farther up the Kennebec than Augusta. Waterville already had the Androscoggin and Kennebec, which had reached here in 1849. In 1879 Mr. Ward went to work for the Maine Central and stayed with that road for 40 years. The last 18 years of his service was spent as crossing tender at the crossing of the main highway on Fairfield’s lower Main Street. As a young man, Mr. Ward tried to enlist in the Civil War, but was rejected because of lung trouble which predicted that his life would be short. Yet, when he retired from the railroad at the age of 80 he was as spry as a man of 60.

I fear it will not be many years before those railroad items will truly be ancient history. Do you realize that it won’t be long before there will be children entering the first grade of school who have never seen a passenger train, just as there are already large numbers of teenagers who never saw in  operation a steam locomotive, but only the diesels.

Year: 1962