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Bath, Maine, situated on the Kennebec River, protected from
stormy seas and with a gradually sloping shoreline throughout
most of its length, is geographically ideally suited for
shipbuilding. Add to this, in the early days of vessel construction
there, the abundance of wood for frames, planking, cabins,
and masts; one can see why Bath became one of the foremost
shipbuilding sites in the world.
It all began in 1607
at nearby Popham Beach, when a courageous
band of Englishmen, having settled there for one winter,
built an ocean-going pinnace, named Virginia for the virgin
Queen Elizabeth. Beginning a few years later, there were
several other vessels launched in the area with hiatuses
due to the Colonial Wars with France and the Native Americans.
Shipbuilding in Bath became continuous
from the 1740’s
on, primarily sloops, schooners, and brigs, used by local
entrepreneurs to carry regionally produced products such
as lumber, bricks, hay, and salted and fresh produce to the
coastal centers of the colonies to the south as well as to
the West Indies. These vessels returned with items which
could not be produced locally, such as molasses, rum, sugar,
and dyes from the West Indies and British or colony manufactured
goods from the cities to the south.
After the revolution, more substantial ships were built,
both for ship owners in other U.S. seaports, as well as for
local men developing fleets to trade with Europe and cotton
ports to the south. Bath also still figured strongly in the
earlier coastal U.S. and West Indies trades.
Many setbacks occurred affecting
not only Bath merchants but U.S. shipping generally, such
as Caribbean and Mediterranean pirates, embargos, wars,
and depressions. But by the 1840’s,
Bath was in the ascendancy with several locally built, owned
and managed square-rigged fleets developing and  returning
large profits to Bath, resulted in considerable fortunes,
such as those of the Pattens, McLellans, Sewalls, Crookers,
and Houghtons. This was the period when many of Bath’s
beautiful ship owner’s mansions and Greek revival workers’ homes
were constructed.
With the discovery of gold in California,
there was a demand for speed in vessels carrying passengers
and much needed cargos to the prospectors there. Bath participated
in this short-lived decade-long boom. They produced a few
true clippers and reached a peak in the number of shipyards
building vessels along the Bath shore at the same time,
22 in all. They
also continued to build primarily profitable cargo carriers,
moving larger cargos, but at a somewhat slower speed.
Many locally-owned vessels were
captured or “sold
foreign” during the Civil War in the 1860’s when
Confederate steam-powered raiders threatened northern shipping,
greatly reducing shipbuilding temporarily.
After the war, Maine built more than half of the ocean-going
wooden sailing  vessels in the United States, and the Bath
area built more than half of those. Most notable of these
were the Downeasters, a compromise between the speed of clippers
and the cargo-carrying capacity of the old bluff-bowed cotton-carrying
vessels. Downeasters were built in Massachusetts and Maine
almost exclusively, and Bath was the capital of this endeavor. Henry
B. Hyde, launched in Bath by John McDonald in 1884,
was the ultimate. The Sewalls and the Houghtons were still
building outstanding ships for their own fleets, but the
firms of Goss and Sawyer, Adams and Hitchcock, William Rogers
and others turned out even more vessels, primarily for non-local
owners. These large cargo-carrying vessels rarely came back
to Bath but ran between major seaports of the world making
money for the owners.
During this same period, the size
and efficiency of fore-and-aft rigged schooners was appreciating.
The first four-mast schooner on the East Coast was built
in Bath in 1880, the largest ever five-mast schooner was
launched there in the 1890’s,
and the largest wooden sailing vessel ever built in the  United
States, the six-mast schooner Wyoming, was launched
from Bath’s Percy and Small Shipyard in 1909. G.G.
Deering, Kelly, Spear and Company, Nathaniel T. Palmer and
William T. Donnell were the other major shipyards during
this twilight of wooden sailing ships. By 1921, wooden shipbuilding
was dead, having lost out to steel steamships.
During the ascendancy of the schooner,
Arthur Sewall and Company built the country’s only
fleet of steel sailing vessels. And the Bath Iron Works
was formed by the former ship machinery specialist, Thomas
W. Hyde, and began to build steel naval vessels, yachts,
and passenger ships.
After World War I, only BIW survived
as a major shipbuilder in Bath. It, too, faltered in the
late 1920’s, but
was soon reborn thanks to William S. Newell and earned a
reputation for building the best steel vessels for the next
80 years.
Worth noting, is the remarkable
record of shipbuilding at Bath Iron Works during World
War II: they launched
a destroyer every 17 days and more destroyers during the
war years than the entire output of all of the Japanese Shipyards. Today
BIW is still building warships for the US Navy in a thoroughly
modern shipyard.
Dr. Charles E. Burden
Maine Maritime Museum
Images provided with permission by Maine
Maritime Museum, be sure
to make them part of your visit to Bath.
Also see these websites for more information on the 400
year celebration:
 
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