Radio Script #546

Little Talks on Common Things

October 7, 1962

More than once on this program I have mentioned ship building on the Kennebec, and have pointed out that in the first thirty years of the 19th century many vessels were built by the Stackpoles, the Moors and the Gilmans right on the bank of the river in Waterville. Tonight I want to give you a more ?ystematic, though very brief, account of how the building of ships developed into a major industry all along the Kennebac from its mouth all the way up to Waterville.

Did you know that Kennebec ship building began thirteen years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock? And I don’t mean the Indian birch-bark canoes. I mean real, ocean-going ships.

The Weymouth colony at the mouth of the Kennebec, founded in 1605, ten years before the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, had been given up as a bad venture and the survivors had sailed back to England after one tough winter on Maine soil. In the summer of 1607 a new settlement, near what is now Popham Beach, was started by Sir Thomas Popham. On the southernmost extremity of the peninsula later known as Phippsburg, the Popham settlers built their huts. That part of the river below Merrymeeting Bay was called by the Indians the Sagadahoc, and Popham named his settlement the Sagadahoc colony. Even before they had completed their log fort and a large storehouse, they set about building the first ship constructed in the New World. It was a small vessel of only 30 tons designed to cruise along the coast and explore up the rivers. They named her the Virginia.

It makes no difference that Popham’s colony, like Weymouth’s before it, failed to become permanent. It set at least one distinguished mark by starting what for two hundred years would be the river’s major industry — the building of ships. Although the Virginia was a very small vessel to brave three thousand miles of Atlantic waves, she proved sturdy enough to carry some of the discouraged colonists back to England in 1608 and got them there safely.

Between 1608 and 1630 there was no white settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec, but in the latter year, ten years after the landing of the Pilgrims, the Plymouth Colony secured a land grant 15 miles back from the river on both sides of the Kennebec. They sold the lower part to Clarki and Lake, who set up business at Arrowsic and there built several vessels. In 1670 there were 30 families on the east side and 20 on the west side of the river in what are now the towns below Bath. Then in 1675 came the disastrous King Philips’ War arousing the Indians all the way from Rhode Island to Maine, :and every settlement from Phippsburg to Merrymeeting Bay Was wiped out. But just a year before the raiding Indians struck the poorly defended settlements, William Phips — the man who would later be knighted Sir William Phips for his recovering sunken treasure on the Spanish Main -had built at Woolwich a ship for Boston owners.

Trouble with the Indians continued sporadically for a quarter of a century after King Philip’s War, until in 1724 the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond near Fryeburg and the destruction of the Abnaki village at Old Point in Norridgewock caused most of the Maine Indians to retire to the St. Francis and the Chaudiere in Canada, leaving the whole valley of the Kennebec open to unhindered white settlement. In 1716 Jonathan Preble moved from York to Arrowsic Island, where he built a large, two-story garrison and fortified home. Two years earlier John Watts had built a similar garrison at Butler’s Point. Those two forts held out against all Indian raids for the next eight years, and Preble lived in his garrison house where he died in 1768, only seven years before the Revolution. In 1722 John Lamont built a garrison house at New Meadows. As early as 1710, stimulated by the fur trade, Fort Richmond had been built some distance above Merrymeeting Bay at old Pownalborough.

Settlement on the west bank opposite Woolwich, where is now the city of Bath, came late. The place had only a few scattered log houses before 1750. Then in 1753 the settlement was incorporated under the name of Long Reach. It was the second distinct parish in the whole area known as Georgetown, which had been incorporated 35 years earlier in 1718.

In 1781, at the close of the Revolution, Long Reach took the name of Bath, and was actually the first new town incorporated by the State of Massachusetts after the acknowledged independence from Great Britain. Jonathan Philbrick and his sons built ships at Bath as early as 1741 and John Lamont opened a shipyard at New Meadows in 1745. The next year Captain Benjamin Donnell took a Bath-built vessel from the Kennebec, loaded with troops and supplies, to an appointed rendezvous at Boothbay, there to join the forces of Sir William Pepperell for the successful attack against Louisburg on Cape Breton Island. Before 1800 more than a hundred sea-going ships had been built at Bath.

The outstanding authority on early ships is a work of several volumes called “Fairburn’s Merchant Sail”. Volume five of that important work has an interesting passage on Waterville built vessels. Let us now see what Fairburn had to say: “Vessels that were sizable in their day were built on the banks of the Kennebec as far north as Waterville, which is located on the west bank some 18 miles north of Augusta, and about 56 miles in direct air line and 60 miles by water from the mouth of the river, which has the distinction of being America’s most historic ship building stream. In the days when the Kennebec was practically the only avenue of transportation, because roads were few and poor, trade between the coast settlements and the back country was dependent upon the river. Waterville became an important trading center because it was the northernmost town on the river to build sea-going ships.

“While many Waterville ships were constructed for the river trade alone, lying between ports all the way from Bath to Waterville, there were launched from several Waterville yards deep sea craft of respectable tonnage. Between 1805 and 1824, according to records at the Bath custom house, seven vessels were built at Waterville for the ocean trade. None of them was large by later standards of the great clippers of the mid~century, but in those early days any vessel of more than 100 tons was considered large.

In 1805 at Waterville James Thatcher built the brig William Gray, a vessel 80 feet long of 155 tons. In 1807 Seth Swift launched a schooner that the Bath records name the Ticonee, but which old Waterville accounts called the Ticonic, a much more probable name. Thomas Stetson in 1809 built the brig America, and in the same year Nathaniel Gilman put into the water the largest of the seven Waterville boats, the brig Madison of 160 tons. The schooner James was the work of Charles Dingley, also in 1809 and two years later James Lamont built the brig Hiram. Then thirteen years elapsed before another Waterville built vessel got into the custom house records at Bath. She was the North Star, built by John Williams in 1824, and she completed the list of the seven recorded ocean-going ships launched from the yards at Waterville.

The first of those seven ships, the William Gray, is interesting because, while built at Waterville, it was not a locally financed vessel. Fairburn tells us: “William Gray, the greatest shipowner of his day, was a prominent merchant of Salem and Boston. He operated no shipyard of his own, but had his ships built where he could get what he wanted at lowest cost. This 1805 ship, named for himself, is the only instance of a Gray contract nth a builder as far inland as Waterville.

Long before John Lang built his Africa-going ship the Ocean Bird, a short distance above Getchell’s Corner, Vassalboro had already seen the launching of substantial ships. From early colonial days there had been built in that town not only river craft, but also sizable brigs and shooners for the ocean trade. Between 1800 and 1830 ten such ships left Vassalboro yards. The largest was the Superior, built in 1815 by Nehemiah Holton. The best known Vassalboro builder in the early days was James Thatcher, who built five of those ten big Vassalboro boats. It was the &llIle James Thatcher who took the contract to build the brig at Waterville for the merchant William Gray in 1805. Augusta saw twelve ships leave the_ys during the first half of the nineteenth century. The largest was a full-rigged ship, the Commonwealth, of 642 tons, built in 1849. It was 143 feet long, a very big ship to be launched so far up the river. Hallowell, as the largest and most important Kennebec town before 1850, saw the building of many ships. In 1811 the brig Hallowell set sail as the largest ship, up to that time, built above Merrymeeting Bay. She displaced 397 tons. But she was small compared with a ship that left Hallowell ways 43 years later, for in 1854 Rufus Hawkes built the full-rigged ship Lorenzo of 1,090 tons, and in the very next year launched another, the Adriana of 1,082 tons.

Richmond was a notable ship building port. During the first half of the 19th century no fewer than 46 Richmond-built vessels were placed on the registry. It was at Richmond that, in 1876, long after the coming of the railroads, the great ship building family of Southards built the largest ship ever launched above Merrymeeting Bay in the whole history of Kennebec ship building. She was the Eureka, 231 feet long and displacing 2,101 tons. It is quite a story — that saga of the Kennebec sailng ships — and it is quite a story of growth in the size of ships, from the 155 ton William Gray to the giant 2,100 ton Eureka. It has gone now, entirely gone, except for the construction of modern powered craft for the U. S. Navy at the big shipyard in Bath.

A number of people have asked me just what were the manufacturing plants in Fairfield along the river in the heyday of those big mills. Of course they differed somewhat through the years. But as we close tonight, let us take a look at the riverbank in Fairfield Village, old Kendalls Mills, in 1884, 78 years ago.

On the island was a plaster mill. Nearby was the big grist mill of Laurence and Blackwell. Along the west side were four huge saw mills: E. Totman and Co., N. Totman and Son, A.H. and C.E. Durem and Stephen A. Nye. There were the furniture plants of the Maine Manufacturing Co. and the Fairfield Furniture Co., the planing and joining mills of J. A. Gilley, and the corn cannery of J. Wilson Jones. Altogether on that location near the bridges in Fairfield there were 78 years ago no less than ten big mills.

Year: 1962