Overview

Despite decades of stiff competition, a few builders in Bath, Maine, the City of Ships, persisted in building wooden schooners, modifying and enlarging them to meet the changing times. Gardiner G. Deering (1833-1921) was one of these diehards. Genial and unaffected but driven to succeed, he started at the bottom of the trade and worked himself to the top, building ninety-nine vessels over his long life, dozens of which he personally managed. As this spirited, absorbing study reveals, Deering prospered in the face of ferocious competition and economic gyrations. Through thick and thin, he seemed to enjoy himself immensely. When Gardiner Deering died in 1921, he was widely acknowledged as the last of his breed, the Patriarch of Maine Shipbuilding.

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9780884483076

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...When Gard Deering died, The Boston Globe wrote: 'His vessels plowed our coastal seas carrying the family name long after most Maine ships had been cut down to coal barges, the others might give up. Not he!...He went on building good wooden vessels when few others could or dared. At the hale age of 88 his sail has finally dipped over the great horizon. New England is the poorer for the loss of him and his kind.'...the work of researchers Carroll Deering and Jackson A. Parker, in telling the unvarnished history, adds greatly to our mutual understanding of maritime history...deserves honored place along side William Avery Baker's classic, 'A Maritime History of Bath, Maine and the Kennebec River Region'-- (12/07/2008)

Author Information

In his earlier life, Ken Martin was a college history professor and a museum director. Since then he has written or co-written more than fifteen books, most of them on maritime history. He lives on the Kennebec River two miles north of the old Gardiner Deering shipyard sites.

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