Maine Maritime Museum

Model of the Wyoming

We headed up through seven miles of New Hampshire (they managed to charge a toll here), into Maine. Our primary stop for the day was the Maine Maritime Museum. At first, we were a little disappointed, until we joined a tour of the place. The museum is the original Percy & Small shipyard for building large wooden schooners, from 1894 to 1920, these were primarily used to haul coal from Maine down to Chesapeake  Bay. The largest of all of these ships was the six masted Wyoming (named because the investors were primarily from Wyoming). In the middle of the grounds was a sculpture that gave you a sense for the size of the ship (except the flag poles were only 120 feet high, versus the 170 feet of the original.

Actual size sculpture of Wyoming

Most of the original buildings of the shipyard are on the grounds (they had various uses including being warehouses for Sears since the time of the shipyard). The standard practice was to make a model of the ship, and then translate the model into actual size. By the time of this shipyard, they actually had to go South to find the yellow pine used to build the ship, men would go into the woods to find lumber of suitable size based on the models. The various buildings housed the translation of the model, saws to cut the wood, and steam boilers to bend the wood. The ribs were the primary structure with wooden plating above and below the ribs. After the ship was built, it was then water proofed. It was all quite fascinating. That night we camped outside Acadia National Park. (We didn’t enter the park, since we had been here a few years before and I’m trying to see new things on this trip.)

Working on the ribs