Boatbuilding on Mount Desert Island

By Laurie Schreiber

Mount Desert Island possesses a rich and diverse history of boatbuilding. Chester Clement was the first of the "lobsteryacht" builders, and Bunker and Ellis elevated the concept. Henry Hinckley started on an old boat-repair wharf and built a world-class brand. Members of the Rich family produced everything from gleaming yachts to rugged workboats, while Sim Davis and Bink Sargent were considered the experts for big draggers. Author Laurie Schreiber highlights the histories of some of the major players in Mount Desert Island's boatbuilding community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: May 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781625856517

Laurie Schreiber

Laurie Schreiber is a freelance writer and editor based on Mount Desert Island. For twenty-two years she wrote for the Bar Harbor Times, and she now contributes regularly to a variety of publications. A collection of her recent writing can be found at https://laurieschreiber.contently.com/.

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Bibliography

PREFACE

Mount Desert Island (MDI) has a rich history in an astonishing variety of boatbuilding activity, nurtured by families, culture and community. Thanks to the friendliness of everyone I’ve approached, this project has been a blast and a wonderful education.

My initial focus was traditional wooden boatbuilding from circa 1900 to 1980. At some junctures, I slipped those bounds for no good reason other than that’s where my rambles took me. MDI as a center of fiberglass begs a second book.

I am deeply indebted to boatbuilders, families, friends and customers of builders; local history gurus Meredith Hutchins and Ralph Stanley; digital archive wizard Charlotte Morrill; and the following:

• Southwest Harbor Public Library and Digital Archive (SWHPLDA)

• Bass Harbor Memorial Library (BHML)

• Tremont Historical Society (THS)

• Southwest Harbor Historical Society (SWHS)

• Great Harbor Maritime Museum (GHMM)

• Mount Desert Island Historical Society (MDIHS)

Chapter 1

O RICHTOWN BROTHERS,

WHERE ART YE?

A SEARCH FOR A BOATBUILDING CLAN

I’m sitting together with wooden boatbuilder Richard Stanley and his wife, Lorraine, in the cockpit of the 1902 Friendship sloop Westwind, a multiyear restoration project on jackstands in his shop. The scent of sawdust is in the air. I ask Richard about his influences as a youngster. Richard comes across as a taciturn person at first, but reminiscences get him going.

There was his father, of course, the Southwest Harbor builder Ralph Stanley, who persisted in wood as most other shops took up fiberglass. But Richard said that he learned mainly by watching and by working on the old wooden boats produced by other builders in the areas. There were the brothers Ronald, Roger and Bob Rich and their father, Clifton Rich. Down the road was, and is, the Southwest Boat Corporation, where they’d be tearing the decks off sardine carriers and rebuilding them like new. Bunker and Ellis worked close by, producing high-end yachts and fishing boats. There were the Richtown rollers, made by old Uly and Frank Rich.

I interrupt. The others were familiar names. But who were Uly and Frank Rich? What were the Richtown rollers?

Ooooh, he says, they were brothers up on the Richtown Road…When I was young, there were a fair amount of Richtown boats still around, but most of them were on their last legs. They were mostly iron-fastened and pine planks, and the iron just rotted the pine out. But they were well-built boats and not bad looking. When we were kids, my father stored one for Bart Coffin, who was a lobster bait dealer, and they used it just as a play boat. It was old and tired. I don’t know what happened to it.

So it was a while ago. No doubt they were related to the other deeply rooted generations of boatbuilding Riches in Tremont and Southwest Harbor, somehow back in misty time. Their boats, like others of the type, had a tendency to roll side to side. Note to self: Find out more about old Uly and Frank Rich.

HALF A MILE AWAY FROM Richtown and a century ago, Clifton Rich sprang from a different branch of the family and began building boats. He was followed in the craft by his sons, Bobby and twins Roger and Ronald, and by Bobby’s son, Chummy. One day, I asked Chummy what he knew about his relatives on Richtown Road, a semicircular village byway that swoops around to Duck Cove and is sometimes just referred to as Richtown.

Somewhere back along the line, we’re all related, he said. There’s that bunch of Riches, there’s our bunch of Riches, there’s the Riches that own the lobster wharf in Bass Harbor and then there’s Jimmy and Merton Rich—all related back somewhere. My mother married a Rich, her sister married a Rich, but two different branches of Riches. So it kind of got confusing.

That’s helpful to know but not much. So I give Ralph Stanley a call. The retired boatbuilder spends a lot of time researching the area’s maritime history. Frank and Uly, he told me, worked in the 1930s, ’40s maybe the ’50s. Their model was quite sharp, said Stanley. I think the sharpness goes back to when they were building double-enders.

Stanley recalled several Richtown boats, one for Wesley Bracy on Cranberry Island, a thirty-five-footer for Oscar Krantz and others for Frenchboro and Swan’s Island fishermen. They built a pleasure boat for one family who hired Tud Bunker to sail it; afterward, it became the Northeast Harbor Fleet’s committee boat. The brothers were Jehovah’s Witnesses. If they built you a boat, they’d give you a Bible, too.

Soon enough, I learned that Chummy’s cousin Meredith Rich Hutchins is the genealogy guru for the family. She lives in Southwest Harbor, and I made the first of what would be several visits to her home (followed up over many months with lots of e-mails and phone calls, as I took advantage of her wealth of knowledge). An author and former librarian, Hutchins is a font of energy who stores neatly filed masses of documents in her home office. She told me, Regarding the different branches and their boatbuilding, the boatbuilding Riches of Richtown should include Frank and Ulysses’s brothers, Roy and Chauncey.

Ben Hinckley Sr.’s boat Scamp. Everbeck Family Collection.

Probably Shearwater. Everbeck Family Collection.

Aha, four brothers—valuable information! She also said that, genealogically speaking, she and Chummy descended from a sea captain named Elias Rich Sr. (1779–1867), while the Richtown Riches descended from Elias’s older brother, Jonathan Rich (1772–1854). Elias had numerous children, including Elias Jr., who married his cousin, Emily Peters Rich, Jonathan’s daughter. I have trouble keeping track, but I guess that’s just a taste of Chummy’s confusion over the branches that eventually produced him.

Before continuing, it’s worth a moment to dwell on Elias père, in tribute to his charming place in local lore. He’s buried near Bernard, having expired at age eighty-eight. According to Nell Thornton’s Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville, an exhaustive litany published in 1938 of people’s homes and businesses in the locality, Elias, known as Heavenly Crown or Crowny, expressed the hope of being privileged to wear a crown of glory in the world to come when he testified at weekly prayer meetings. A discoloration of his gravestone assumed the outline of a crowned head, prompting Holman Day, a Maine journalist and poet of the early twentieth century, to imagine Crowny’s nightly prayers:

I’ve never hankered no great on earth for more’n my food and roof.

And all of the meat that I’ve had to eat was cut near horn or hoof;

But I thank Thee, Lord, that I’ve earnt my way and I haint got on the town

And when I die I know that I shall sartin wear a crown.

The poem goes on a while, sniping at Elias’s wife, who scoffed his faith. But now folks wonder if Elias came from Heaven stealing down/To mutely say in this quaint way that now he wears his crown.

Anyway, remnants of an old Elias Rich wharf can still be seen at low tide on the Richtown shore. It’s unclear whether the wharf was built by Elias Sr. or Jr. Meredith mentioned that she heard this from Elizabeth Dibbie Parsons, a relation of the Richtown Riches, and noted that I should go and talk with Parsons’s sons: Jeff, who works at the hardware store, or Allen, who runs a landscaping business in the heart of Richtown.

By the way, Meredith said, she has a February 15, 1933 Maine Sunday Telegram article that discusses the Richtown branch. This was massively exciting. Up until then, I couldn’t find any newspaper mentions of the brothers. However, an online search found the rest of the family. The parents were Maurice Peters Rich Jr. and Lois Helen Thurston, born in the 1840s. And there were two more children: Ruthven, called by his middle name, Pearl, was the oldest. Nadia Mae was the only daughter.

The article rightly extols Richtown as a beautiful location where nice people live, mostly self-supporting, and all rigidly honest. No one has ever lived there but Riches and the men and women who have married into the family, and although the young people go away from there to go to sea and to work for a while in the city, usually Boston or thereabouts, most of them eventually come home.

The text notes that the first Rich arrived in the area by boat, necessarily, from Marblehead, Massachusetts. His name was Jonathan and his equipment consisted of his young wife, a pair of oxen and one very strong hand, the other hand having been lost in some accident or battle forgotten in the shades of history.

Jonathan selected a location where there was good soil, a freshwater stream and a shelving beach suitable for shipways to launch vessels into beautiful Blue Hill Bay. This was the start of generations of Riches building clipper ships, coasters, fishing boats and yachts. For the time, Jonathan’s son, Maurice Peters Rich Sr. (1805–1879), was the most famous builder of the family; his activities coincided with the clipper ship era of American history. Some of his better-known vessels were the Seabird, the Tangent and the 150-foot, three-hundred-ton half-brig M.P. Rich. Anecdotes about Maurice commemorate his individualism. One day, he capsized in a gale. He crawled up and straddled the keel, in danger of being swept off in the heavy seas. A rescue boat arrived.

Can you tow in the sloop? yelled Maurice.

No, came the reply. I can save you, but I can’t tow your boat.

All right, said Maurice, I’ll ride my wooden horse until somebody comes along who can tow her.

Rich-built boats, the writer noted, are solid and long-lasting. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the clan accommodated the arrival of the gasoline engine by designing a new craft suitable for fishing offshore throughout the year and capable of fair speed. Richtown and Clifton Rich boats dominated fishing boat design in the area. No Rich has ever built a boat that couldn’t work off this shore all winter, and probably couldn’t be hired to do so.

Another view of Scamp. Everbeck Family Collection.

By then, the brothers, averaging thirty years old, had developed a compound of about eight houses. When the article was written, they were building a boat for a local fisherman. Their work was coveted by recreational boaters, too. Among them were the wealthy and prominent, such as Richard C. Paine of Paine and Webber in Boston and Ernest Martin Hopkins, Dartmouth College’s president from 1916 to 1945.

SOON IT WAS SPRINGTIME, and Parsons landscaping trucks appeared around town, reminding me to go to the hardware store to buy grass seed. This put me within aisle space of Jeff Parsons. I asked him how his mother, Elizabeth Parsons, was doing and if she knew the Richtown Riches. Oh my goodness, yes. Jeff himself remembered Uncle Frank. I should give his mother a call.

At the seaward bulge of the Richtown peninsula, greenswards roll down to the shore, dotted by homes and rental cottages. Elizabeth’s house is at the center of this neighborly cluster. I didn’t have a good handle yet on how she’s related to the Riches. She took me inside and showed me a photo of her late husband, Allen Parsons Sr. Allen’s mother was Mae, the sister of the boatbuilding brothers and the owner of the house in which Elizabeth lives. Elizabeth pointed out the kitchen window to a white house with black shutters. That was Uncle Frank’s house. Uncle Uly lived in the white house next to that. Roy had another house behind the trees. Chauncey died before Elizabeth was married to Allen. Also seen is a barn-like structure. That’s where the boatbuilding shop was.

Elizabeth explained that Frank was married to Goldie Corinne Thurston. Goldie ran a summer tearoom in her house. Goldie’s sister was Georgia, whose nickname was Sally. The sisters were close,