USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 2 > Part 43
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"Ibid., II, 187-188. TIbid., I, 24-25.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
and the Pacific Coast, coal on the outward and grain on the return passages. Her voyages were, as a rule, rather longer than average, but she was regarded as a good ship and had no major mishaps. During all her career as an American ship she was commanded by Captain Ira A. Storer, a figure well remembered by the older generation of Waldoboro folk.8
The Isaac Reed was the largest ship built in Waldoboro prior to 1875. She registered 1550 tons and was launched September 30, 1875. She was named in honor of the builder's father, the Honor- able Isaac Reed, Congressman and Whig candidate for Governor of Maine in 1853 and 1855. She made four Cape Horn passages, and the remainder of her career, prior to 1900, was spent in the Far Eastern trade. She was a fair sailer and on the whole had an uneventful career. In July 1924 she came to the end of her days, a wreck on the California coast.9
The ship Willie Reed was built by A. R. Reed & Co., and was launched June 11, 1877. She registered 1450 tons. Her maiden voyage was to England, and William Reed, whose name she bore, was the passenger of honor on this trip. The Willie Reed was one of the best vessels ever built in Waldoboro. She was owned mainly by Reed & Co., and Yates & Porterfield of New York. Captain Oscar S. Yates of Bristol was in command during the entire sea life of the ship. The Reed was engaged in trade mainly with Australia and the Far East. She made only three Cape Horn pas- sages to North Pacific ports. This craft was an excellent sailer, her fastest run being from San Francisco to Dublin in 114 days. On July 1, 1882, she and the ships Jabez Hawes (Newburyport built), Seminole (Mystic, Conn.) and Eliza McNeil (Thomaston) sailed from San Francisco and were together four days later. Cap- tain John B. Emerson of the McNeil wrote that his ship outsailed all but the Willie Reed, and on another occasion when both of these ships were near Cape Horn, bound to the westward, the Reed was given credit for sailing somewhat faster than the McNeil. The last completed voyage of the Willie Reed was in 1893-1894, from New York to Astoria in 153 days; Astoria to Queenstown in 124 days, from whence she proceeded with cargo to Ipswich. On February 12, 1894, she went ashore at San Quentin near Royon on the French coast and became a total loss.10
The Emily Reed, last in these brief narratives of Waldoboro ships, had perhaps the most varied and adventurous career. She was built by A. R. Reed and was launched in November 1880. She was next to the last ship Mr. Reed constructed, and the largest up to the year 1880, registering 1565 tons. Her owners were Yates
8 Matthews, II, 54-55.
Ibid., 187-188.
10Ibid., I, 370.
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Sunset Years
& Porterfield of New York, and she operated in the main from Atlantic ports to. Australia, China, and Japan. In 1885 in passage from New York to San Francisco, while off Cape Horn, the cargo shifted, her spars were sprung, and most of her fresh water was lost. Again in July 1890, while off the Horn, she encountered heavy gales. Giant seas kept her submerged for four days. Her forecastle was stove in and washed overboard with all cooking utensils, the same sea taking six of her crew. The next morning two more men were swept overboard. An old iron pot found in a forward locker was used as a stove on which all food was cooked until she finally reached Rio de Janeiro.
The last voyage of the Emily Reed was from Newcastle, England, to Portland, Oregon, with coal. At 2:00 A.M., February 14, 1908, when 103 days out, she went ashore on the coast of Oregon near the mouth of the Nehalem River. I spent the summer of 1912 in this locality, a picturesque spot, where the Japanese current sets in on the coast and the water is shallow for some miles off shore. The natives in this section recalled the incident of the foundering of the ship, but we are here able to give the account of her master, Captain Kessel, who wrote:
When the ship struck the main-mast jumped out of her and she broke into just abaft the main-mast. Myself, wife and four men were on the after end, while the mate and the rest of the crew were forward. The mate was getting a boat off the forward house when a particularly big sea swept everything and everybody forward overboard. The mate and four men managed to hang ahold of the boat, but nine men were drowned. The boat was nearly swamped and in an effort to bale her out, the fresh water breakers were lost. After some days of suffering and hardship, the boat's occupants made land, but one man, the cook, had died from drinking sea water.
In the meantime the Captain and his companions were holding on to the aft end of the ship. The mizzen rigging was cut so as to allow the mast to go over the side. After a time the after house broke loose from the hull and drifted closer in shore. A sailor, named Sullivan, after being swept back by the breakers several times, managed to get a line ashore and attached to a tree. By means of this line the rest of the Cap- tain's party were able to make a landing after much buffeting by the breakers. The party then tramped twelve miles before reaching an habitation.
The ship was lost through an error in the chronometers, they show- ing her to be sixty miles off shore when she struck. The weather was very foggy at the time.11
Just as in the case of ships the largest schooners, too, were built in the Waldoboro yards at the very end of the era. They were the Governor Ames, 1689 tons, built by Leavitt Storer in 1888; the Augustus Welt, 1162 tons, built by Welt & Co., in 1889;
11Idem, II, 102-105.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
the James W. Fitch, 1064 tons, built by Leavitt Storer in 1890, and the Hattie P. Simpson, built by Reed & Co., in 1891. Of these vessels the Governor Ames merits her own story, as, strictly speak- ing, she was the first five-masted schooner built in the United States. At the time of her construction it was known that a five- master had been built in 1881 on the Great Lakes, and another on the Pacific Coast, but the Great Lakes craft had at least one yard on the foremast, and the Pacific coast boat had no topmasts, hence in the strict sense neither could be construed to be a schooner.
It was a great day in Waldoboro when the Ames, named for the then Governor of Massachusetts, was launched. Even though it was the first day of December spectators came from miles around. One hundred came from Rockland, leaving that town at 5:00 A.M., on a combination freight and passenger train. At 8:05 A.M., the Ames glided into the water without a hitch and anchored in the channel. The builder had put a lot of timber into this schooner. For one thing, there were 460 cubic tons of selected Virginia white oak timber and 876,000 feet of Georgia pine. The vessel was framed up from a keel that stretched 232 feet. The masts were 115 feet long and thirty inches in diameter, and the topmasts were fifty-six feet long and twenty-two inches in diameter at the cap. The jib boom was seventy-five feet long, and under full sail the schooner spread 7000 yards of canvas.
Captain John C. Weston was in charge of the launching and temporarily of the schooner, while Captain Alden Winchenbach was pilot on the Bath tug, Adelia. She was towed to Schenck's Point where she remained until Sunday, and was then taken to Muscongus Harbor where her fittings were completed. Lewis K. Benner was master mechanic; John W. Creamer, master fastener; Miles W. Standish, the caulker; William H. Wilson had charge of the ceiling gang; S. O. Waltz Sons did the joiner work; J. Sewall Hatch, the blacksmith work; Osgood Miller, the painting; E. A. Wentworth of Rockport worked the planking, and James Boyd furnished the rudder braces, gypsy winches, composition bolts and spikes, brass chocks, etc. The sails were made by William T. Zuell of Fall River and C. H. Washburn of Thomaston.
"The Big Schooner," under charter to load coal at Baltimore for Providence, sailed in ballast from Round Pond, December 9th, with bad luck not many days away. Two days later a gale caught her some fifty miles southeast of Cape Cod. At the height of the blow, the splicing of the standing rigging of the foremast let go. Captain C. A. Davis, sensing the seriousness of the situation, took in all sail and came to anchor to keep the schooner's head into the wind. The rigging continued to slacken, increasing the strain on the foremast, which finally broke close to the deck. Pulled
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Schooner GOV. AMES, 1764 Tens. Capt. C. A. DAVIS. Baút by LEAVITT STONER, Waldobero, Me. Launched Deo, 1, 1088.
AN OLD KNOX AND LINCOLN TRAIN
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Sunset Years
down by the spring stays and the loss of support from the fore- rigging, the other masts came down in one, two, three, four order. To add to the danger it was found that the Ames was dragging a three-ton anchor and 180 feet of chain and was drifting toward George's Bank. Soon the anchor caught on a sea bottom ledge and the chain parted at the ninety fathom shackle. At this juncture two fishermen showed up, and Captain Davis was carried by one of them into Gloucester, and dispatched the ocean-going tug, H. F. Morse, to the schooner's aid.
The Ames was towed to Boston for repairs which cost $10,000. In January 1889 she was again ready for sea and was chartered to load lumber at Portland for Buenos Aires, but not until the end of April did she put to sea with a cargo of 1,896,000 feet of spruce and pine. This time she reached her destination in safety, and continued her career on the high seas until well into the new century. Wimble Shoals, twenty-five miles north of Cape Hatteras, was the big schooner's final resting place in the year 1909. One member of the crew survived, Josiah R. Spearing. There follows his account of the Ames' last hours:
At 10:00 o'clock on the morning of Monday, December 13, Charles Morris took the wheel. Before eight bells we were ordered to reef sail. The Captain [Nova Scotia born A. M. King] was on deck when we got there. A few minutes after starting to reef sail the ship struck bottom.
The seas were running heavy and the ship began to pound and break to pieces. With the rest of the crew I assisted in protecting the wife of the Captain, until the main-mast, to which she had been lashed, killed her and one of the sailors, who was attempting to unlash her to give her better protection. The main-mast fell with the rest of the masts. I went on the forecastle head with the mate. From there we went to the jib boom, staying there until I was washed inboard. I then made my way, crawling and walking some, to the stump of one of the aftermasts.
There two or three men were hanging to the stump of the mast which was leaning aft, and one man was on top of the mast. He asked me to hold him as he said his fingers were gone. I did until the mast went down and we were washed off.
I washed hold of some ties until I could catch hold of the hatch, which was floating near me. I held on that a while until I floated near the strongback of the maindeck and ribs that had been spiked or bolted across, which made a good raft. I floated on that until I was picked up by the steamship, Shawmut, bound for Charleston, South Carolina.12
By the early 90's shipbuilding in Waldoboro had become virtually extinct. The Lincoln County News, surveying the then existent status of the industry, commented sadly:
An illustration of the decay of shipbuilding is seen on the west side, where the owner of a number of shipyards has been ploughing them up for the purpose of converting them into grass fields. It would be difficult
12 Account of Mark Hennessy, printed in the Portland Press Herald.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
to give a list of the large number of vessels built in these yards in years gone by, before the memory of the present generation. The last vessel launched there was built by Leavitt Storer.13
Fifty years before, according to Robert P. T. Coffin, American ports ranked in the following order: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, New Bedford, Waldoboro, Bath.14 From the sixth port in the United States to grass land in a half century represents a metamorphosis the like of which few spots in Amer- ica have ever witnessed.
To all of Waldoboro it had seemed that shipbuilding in the town was at its end, when in 1900 there came a brief but glamorous afterglow in the great industry. William F. Palmer of Boston con- tracted locally for his six mammoth five-masted schooners which became known as "the Palmer Fleet," the smallest of which, the Paul Palmer, was larger than any vessel heretofore built in the town, and the largest, the Harwood Palmer, of 2400 tons registry, was the largest of any craft ever constructed on the Medomak. George L. Welt, a nephew of one of the town's major shipbuilders, Augustus Welt, was in charge of the construction of this fleet. The big, white sailers followed one another in swift succession - the Fannie, the Baker, the Paul, the Dorothy, the Singleton, and the Harwood Palmer. By 1904 the last of the big schooners was in the water, and it was all over. There had been enough of the old, ex- perienced talent in the town to build this fleet with but little outside labor. The Lincoln County News commented as follows on the initial setup, which started with the first member of the fleet, the Fannie Palmer, of 2075 tons:
At Welt's shipyard the big five-masted schooner is growing every day. The lower hold is ceiled up and the hanging knees in place. The strength of a modern vessel is shown by the keels on which is seven feet deep and thirty-eight inches wide, contains 70,000 feet of hard pine and is bolted with more than thirty-five tons of iron. From the top of the keelson to the bottom of the keel, the measurement is nearly eleven feet. The planking crew begins today under the direction of A. C. Erskine of Alna, who had charge of the ceiling. Wilford F. Mank has a crew of such veteran sparmakers as John E. White, Winfield G. Ewell, Judson Mank, and Anthony Castner, preparing the five masts which came from Oregon. When completed they will be 112 feet long. The foremast will be 29 inches, the others 28 inches in diameter. Standish and Ludwig have their caulkers at work spinning oakum. About 125 men are employed at the present time.15
The Fannie Palmer went into the Medomak on November 9, 1900 - beautifully and easily, on one of the most terrific tides
13 July 27, 1893.
14The Kennebec (New York: Farrar & Rinehart), p. 136. Perhaps the Custom's District is the unit referred to here.
15 Aug. 2, 1900.
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Sunset Years
in recorded history. On this same tide the tug Seguin started the big schooner down the river, but the wind freshened from the eastward, and the vessel, high in the water, presented so much surface to it, that she became unmanageable and grounded in on the western flats near "the Middle Grounds." There the tide left her and since such tides are seldom recurrent, her plight was definitely precarious, and it was feared that further construction in the town was in for a tragic check. All efforts on the part of tugs proved in vain, and the only alternative was to dig a canal in to her from the main channel and thus float her out. The car- penters and all yardmen turned to on the task and gave their time. A tug remained on the river to keep the channel open in freezing weather. For weeks the force labored, each tide nulli- fying their labor in part by washing the mud back into the ex- cavated area. The job was finally completed, the schooner pulled back into the channel and towed without further incident from the river.
The tide on which the schooner was launched and went aground is worthy of passing note. It flowed over the lower falls and carried driftwood to the Soule dam.16 Such a tide was beyond the recall of the oldest timer, and its like does not seem to have recurred in the last half century. The other five schooners of this majestic fleet were completed, launched, and towed to sea without any recurrence of such a depressing experience.
After the disappearance of the Palmer fleet from the river there followed a long interlude of idleness. It was believed that the great industry in Waldoboro was dead forever. This proved to be not quite the case, for after the lapse of forty years came the Second World War with ships of all types a vital need - naval ves- sels, cargo vessels, and food gathering vessels. To aid in meeting such needs and within the range of available facilities, the Waldo- boro Shipyard Inc., came into being in May 1942, capitalized and managed by the Cooney family. In the line of this family's an- cestry were the Sampsons, the Schenks, and the Trowbridges, con- necting it with the town since early days. No family has had more sympathy for the well-being of the community, and none of the present generation have promoted its interests so courageously and imaginatively.
This corporation acquired the old Reed & Welt yard along with the sites of several more of the older yards south of, and adjacent to, this property. The corporation was organized as fol- lows: President, Carroll T. Cooney, Sr .; Vice President and Gen- eral Manager, Carroll T. Cooney, Jr .; Directors, Russell S. Cooney and Stuart Hemingway. The yard was fully and finely equipped
16 Lincoln County News, December 6, 1900.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
and operations were begun in the summer of 1942. There were in all seven ways, two of which were under cover for winter build- ing. "The big shop" was 154x35x28 feet, and in addition there were all the adjunct structures essential to construction. The first master builder was Frank B. Day, Yard Superintendent and Drafts- man, who in the years of peace was succeeded by Scott Carter. The peak employment in wartime was 110 men, which rated well . with the yard crews of an older day. After the war Scott Carter became master builder and the yard employed about fifty men.
The first craft to be launched were four harbor tugs for the United States Navy. Thereafter came a steady stream of draggers and yachts. The largest vessel built was the dragger, Edith and Lillian, a very sizable boat with an overall of 103 feet, equipped with 400 H.P. Diesel-Atlas engines, and all other appurtenances to match. Her cost of $150,000, double the figure for the Governor Ames, represents the largest financial outlay of any craft ever constructed on the river.17
The record of these vessels in their economic spheres has been excellent. The Edith and Lillian has been one of the high- liners sailing out of Gloucester. Her first haul was 225,000 pounds of fish, and in her first three months of operations she brought over 1,500,000 pounds to port. During the war years this Waldo- boro fleet brought between ten and twelve million pounds of fish ashore. In the years of food scarcity this large contribution to the existing food shortage was gratefully recognized, and in conse- quence the yard received high priorities on building materials.
A list of the ships built on the Medomak in this last brief period of construction forms a part of the appendix of this volume. Whether or not this last episode in the town's ancient industry may prove to be its valedictory, no man may say. The world in this year 1952 has become too strange for sane prediction, for each day we live in the shadow of the realization that anything may happen.
17Data furnished by Carroll T. Cooney, Jr.
XLV
EDUCATIONAL ANARCHY
... and men loved the darkness rather than the light.
ST. JOHN (4:19)
TH HE HISTORY OF EDUCATION in Waldoboro presents the drabbest pages in the town's annals. Certain definite causes of this condi- tion have been sketched in earlier chapters of this history. In brief summary they are: the fixed tradition of the German peasan- try that beyond easy reading, simple writing, and the basic cal- culations of arithmetic, education was not essential to their chil- dren, and was in fact a handicap to their way of life; the nar- row shrewdness and the thrift of the "Dutch" founders, as well as the extreme poverty of many of them; and a thin and scat- tered distribution of the early population over the large land area of the town, which would have required an extensive and costly educational setup. The early Puritans migrating into the district did not possess the political power to ameliorate this condition, even had they been so minded, and so the original pattern had continued to perpetuate itself.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the town was at the peak of its great era, and yet the picture of the schools had changed but little. Progress in education was literally hamstrung by the obsolete practices whereunder each district, primarily through its "agent," managed its own schools and hired its own teachers. In many of these local areas the population was so indifferent to its schools that education represented little more than a partial and routine conformity to state law. This vicious system of district management continued down close to the end of the century, long after it had been discarded by every progressive community in the state.
There was also another factor which operated to vitiate edu- cational progress in the town. This was to be found in the fact that political dominance rested in the hands of "the fresh water," or back-district folk. For decades these people had been griev- ously exploited by the money-grubbing village squires, and these
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
wrongs and the wrongs done to their neighbors had led to a deep- seated animosity which sought its own bitter retaliation. With a controlling vote the back-districts were in a position to manipulate the purse strings and hence to decide what could and what could not be done. They found their revenge in checking and thwarting every move made by the villagers in the central district (No. 6) to improve the educational lot of the children of the town, and more especially those in the village district. Every forward step in the schools was delayed for decades, until the whirlwind raised after the squires sowed the wind had blown itself out, or until the flames of decade-old resentment had become little more than smoking embers.
The development or lack of development in education in the town becomes understandable or meaningful only when sur- veyed in the light of these facts. After 1850 the pattern must have seemed to many of the thwarted villagers a changeless one, with the same old vicious system perpetuating itself decade after decade, inching ahead a bit one year and falling back again the next.
These abstract conclusions are most vividly realized and most clearly seen in concrete developments in the educational sphere, when such are presented in their time sequence from year to year until the exact configuration of the pattern assumes vivid, historical form.
Beginning with the sixth decade of the century the edu- cational setup was little different from that of earlier decades. The real power for good or evil was still vested in the district which managed its school through its own elected agents, whose primary aim in many cases seems to have been to secure teachers, without respect to competence, at the lowest possible wage. A Superintending School Committee existed mainly because it was required by law. Its functions in the town went little beyond the point of observing and recommending. Its lawful duties and powers were consistently ignored by vote in Town Meetings, whenever its personnel presumed to exercise any of the powers vested in it by state statute. In fact, the battle of the districts outside of the village against a central authority, legally constituted, is the peculiarly dominant characteristic and the ever recurrent note in the school picture down to the close of the century.
In the year 1851 educational statistics, according to the re- port of the School Committee, were the following: There were in the town 1733 pupils between the ages of four and twenty-one; these, or a fraction of them, attended schools in twenty-three dis- tricts and two parts of districts. The town in this year appropriated $1,700.00 for schools which with the bank tax produced a school
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Educational Anarchy
budget of $1,833.93, a sum giving to each district an average annual allotment of $76.41 for the support of its schools, which was an average for each pupil of about $1.06 per year. The school com- mittee men were elected for terms of three, two, and one year. A teacher usually taught only one term in a district. In 1851 there were twenty-one male and thirty-five female teachers. The average wage for male teachers was about $4.50 a week, and for females $1.68 per week in the summer and $2.06 per week in the winter schools.1
The reports of the Superintending School Committees afford the truest insight which we have at hand into conditions in the schools of a century ago. These provide us with a recital of fla- grant deficiencies from year to year, about which nothing or little was ever done. It is a curious trait of the human animal to accept only those facts as facts which he finds congenial to his existing beliefs. Hence from this point on the uncongenial facts (and most of them are of that order) will be heavily documented. The report of 1852 is revealing since it furnishes us a picture of the schoolhouses themselves in this era, concerning which there had been a recent investigation and report by the state. The report as provided by the Committee follows in excerpted form:
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