Wooden Boats, Nutmeg Builders

Shipbuilding, for pleasure, commerce and defense is an enduring Connecticut industry, starting in the Colonial era and continuing through today. Shipbuilding along the Connecticut River was one of the largest industries with the exception of agriculture during the 18^th and 19^th Century.

Some two dozen vessels were built in the Goodspeed Shipyard between 1848 and 1881.  Over the years there were about 42 shipyards between Saybrook and Springfield, Massachusetts. In the early period they built small coastwise vessels, sloops and schooners many of them in response to the stone industry, to carry brownstone, cobble, and granite from the Connecticut River Valley to New York. 

In the later years the shipyards congregated in the lower valley and they began building 700 to 1,000 tonners. Many of them cotton packets for the cotton packet trade that many Connecticut families invested in. Others were whalers and vessels for the European packet trade as well.

The number of vessels sailing along the rivers and the Sound were just tremendous today you don’t really get a glimpse of it at all because of the size and the types of vessels have changed.

For a small state, in the 19^th Century, Connecticut had a far-reaching impact in the maritime industry. Although most of the oceangoing long-distance vessels sailed from large ports like New York City or Boston, ownership often was Connecticut-based.

Being so close to New York, which was the chief port of the nation during the 19^th Century, was very important to the development not only of New York but also Connecticut itself. Connecticut built the vessels that sailed out of the Port of New York, supplied the merchants who operated the counting houses and the commission houses and also supplied the ship captains who sailed many of these vessels as well.

During the era of the clipper ship, for example, Connecticut furnished 22 clipper ships to the Port of New York. A clipper ship actually was a vessel that was designed to carry cargo in the quickest possible fashion to the gold fields of California.  They were very heavily sparred, heavily canvassed vessels, which carried a lot of sails.

The clipper ship era lasted about 10 years, from 1850 to 1860, Connecticut participated in it principally through the port of Mystic.  The Mystic clippers were kind of a distinctive vessel.  In fact, the speed record from New York to San Francisco during that 10-year period was held by Mystic built clippers three of those years.

One of the clippers built in Mystic was a ship called the Andrew Jackson whose master was also a Mystic man, Captain John E. “Kicking Jack” Williams. And he is credited along with the famous Massachusetts built Flying Cloud as making the fastest passage from New York to San Francisco, making that voyage in 89 days and 4 hours.

There are still a few remaining shipyards in Connecticut today.  The building of wooden boats is all but a vanishing trade. 

Adapted From Connecticut and The Sea - by Kenneth A. Simon