Bath: Shipbuilding in Maine 53:54N 69:49W
Millybrown
Mark Hillmann
Tue 7 Oct 2008 14:08
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No jokes about baths please, we did have showers at
the museum.
Bath has been a major shipbuilding town on the
Kennebec River for many years. They built wooden schooners until 1920, but
had started building iron and later steel ships by then. In the second
world war they built 82 destroyers in the yard. More than the entire
Japanese navy.
They are still building naval ships here and not
undercover like some British yards. You can see two bridges on
the right, a high level road bridge and the low railway bridge with
a span at the centre lifted to allow a ship through.
 We moored off a museum on the site of a yard where
they built 6 masted wooden schooners.
 The schooners they built had an average life
of only 12 years. With shipwreck, war, fire or pirates there was a large
attrition rate and after 12 years they were growing old. Milly Brown is 35
years old and may do another 35.
The later British clippers like Cutty Sark were
composite, iron frames and timber planking, and she is still afloat. The
schooner in this picture was built in 1942 at Lunenburg in Nova Scotia. The very last of the Grand Banks fishing
schooners. She had an engine but still had a dozen dories for 24
of the crew to put out 1 mile long lines with hundreds of hooks.
In an area notorious for fog this seems a very
risky way of life.
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