To understand the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, you have to know the story of its founders, Bobby and Ruth Ives.
In Maine, there are at least five wooden boatbuilding schools, but the Carpenter’s Boat Shop is different. It was created in 1979 by Bobby and his wife, Ruth, to help people find peace and purpose through boatbuilding. As Bobby describes it, the Carpenter’s Boat Shop teaches boatbuilding while also giving people a chance “to think, to live without fear, to love without reserve, and willingly work for the benefit of others.”
For Bobby, the idea of creating a place for people who were seeking a path in life—spiritual orphans of a sort—was sparked in the 1960s when he was an undergraduate student at Bowdoin College. He’d been orphaned as a teenager and the idea of building something with others appealed to him because he had received so much help from others.
The notion to live and work communally was reinforced in the early 1970s when he was studying for a masters in the history of religion at the University of Edinburgh. Bobby was interested in ecumenical church history and as a Quaker he was inspired by the Quakers. But in Scotland he learned about the Brethren of the Common Life, a Roman Catholic religious community founded in the Netherlands that espoused work, worship, prayer, hospitality and service to others on a daily basis. Bobby thought it made sense to live every day with that type of meaning and purpose. In Scotland, he also met Ruth, who shared his feelings. After marrying in 1973 they set out to find a place where they could live according to those
