Maine Maritime Museum

The availability of timber and water power meant that many to the towns along the Maine coast became shipbuilding centres. The town of Bath on the  Kennebec River was no exception to this. Originally called Long Reach, it was first settled around 1640.but until 1724 the settlers were driven out repeatedly by conflicts with the Indians. The settlement was incorporated in 1738 as part of Georgetown but became a separate town in 1781, named after the city of Bath in England. Shipbuilding has been a mainstay of Bath since the mid-eighteenth century and the tradition continues today with  Bath Iron Works building high-tech naval ships for the US navy and for other countries.  Because of its long association with shipbuilding, Bath is known as ‘The City of Ships’. The last shipyard building wooden ships in Bath was the Percy & Small Shipyard, founded in 1896. It was acquired by the Bath Marine Museum in 1971 which with a new name of the Maine Maritime Museum preserved the old shipyard as a major part of part of their museum. 

Schooner Sherman Zwicker

Sherman Zwicker is a wooden auxiliary fishing schooner built in 1942 at the Smith and Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.  She is a sister ship to the famous Bluenose, a replica of which is based out of Lunenburg. The Sherman Zwicker was part of a fleet of hundreds of wooden schooners that fished the dangerous waters of the Grand Banks region of the North Atlantic. She was equipped with  masts and sails but also had a very powerful diesel engine. Today she has been preserved as a travelling museum and is a frequent visitor to the Maine Maritime Museum. Click Tab 2 to see the galley & fo'csle of the schooner.

Historic small craft

In addition to a representation of one the largest wooden ships ever built, the old shipyard buildings are used to house a collection of historic small craft.

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Donnell House

This historic house museum provides an insight into the lives of the shipyard owners.  It was built for shipwright William T Donnell in 1868 and from it he could look over the shipyard that he bought from his mother-in-law. In 1901 Donnell sold the land to the Percy & Small Shipyard and the Maine Maritime Museum acquired the house with the old shipyard.

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Main entranceof Maine Maritime Museum

We arrived at the Maine Maritime Museum in mid afternoon. The museum is open throughout the year from 9:30am to 5:00pm but the outdoor area (the old shipyard) closes at 4:00pm, so we had to rush round it before it closed. 

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Outline of ship 'Wyoming'

The Wyoming was the largest wooden commercial sailing ship ever built in North America. The six-masted schooner was built by Percy & Small on this site and she was launched in 1909. Unfortunately her size meant that the Wyoming would flex in heavy seas, allowing water into her hull. She was fitted with pumps to combat this, but  the pumps could not save her in March 1924 when she  foundered in heavy seas and sank with the loss of all hands. The museum’s campus is dominated by a sculpture that traces the outline of the Wyoming.  The sculpture is full size, roughly 140 metres (450 feet) in length with six flagpoles to represent her masts.. 

© Mike  Elsden 1981 - 2023

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