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Young laborers took on dirty, demanding jobs in hopes of rising through the ranks.

By TOM BELL, Staff Writer September 2, 2007

Workers in the era of wooden ships typically began their careers with the dirtiest, most physically demanding jobs in the yard: lugging hot tar to caulking crews, hauling lumber, mixing paint, setting up scaffolding, pounding fastenings, drilling holes, driving teams of draft horses.

"There was a lot of physical labor, and the young guys starting off were stronger than the older, more experienced people," said Christopher Hall, the collections manager at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. "If you were a master joiner, you didn't worry about how the lumber got into your shop."

Men rose up through the ranks as they gained more skills. Because they were often related to other people in the yard, their family's position often dictated how fast they moved up, said Niles Parker, executive director of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport.

The trade required both skill and stamina.

In Bath shipyards in the late 1800s and early 1900s, men worked 55 to 65 hours a week, according to the 1999 book, "A Shipyard in Maine," by Ralph Snow and Douglas Lee, which chronicled the history of the Percy & Small shipyard in Bath.

Between 1894 and 1920, the yard built 41 large schooners, including the six-masted Wyoming, one of largest wooden sailing vessels ever built. The schooners were built to carry coal, the only cargo still profitable for sailing vessels in an era increasingly dominated by steam freighters.

Like most industrial jobs at the time, the work could be dangerous. During the 23-year period when Percy & Small was building and repairing wooden ships, 55 men were involved in accidents that were serious enough to be reported in the newspapers, according to research by Snow and Lee. Six of those accidents were fatal.

Between 1888 and 1895, the average worker building wooden ships in Maine was 42 years old, worked 10 hours a day, and earned $541 a year, about $11,700 in today's dollars, according to Maine Bureau of Industrial Labor Statistics data compiled by Maine Maritime Museum.

Workers had no paid vacations or holidays, and nearly all the shipyard workers supplied their own hand tools. Sixty-six percent belonged to labor organizations.

Because of bad weather, delays in materials or personal choice, the average shipyard worker was idle a quarter of the total working days each year.

However, most shipyard families had a garden, perhaps a cow, and access to free fuel in the form of wood chips from the yard. Forty-four percent owned their homes.

Percy & Small continued to build wooden sailing vessels even as other yards in the United States and Maine were building ships made of iron and powered by steam. The company employed 250 men in the summer of 1908, but the work force dwindled to just a dozen in 1910 due to the lack of demand for wooden ships.

The yard slumped between 1910 and 1914 but saw a resurgence during World War I, when shipping rates surged and many sailing vessels were used to transport bulk cargo to Europe. German U-boats sank several of the yard's ships, which were easy targets because they moved so slowly.

The end of the war also meant an end to the industry devoted to the construction of wooden ships.

As shipping rates crashed in 1920, Percy & Small discontinued the work on its final schooner while the framing gang was erecting the frame. According to some accounts, the frame was sold for firewood.

Some of the shipyard's carpenters found work building houses or making furniture. Others got jobs at the Bath Iron Works Shipbuilding Co.

They likely started at the bottom again, accepting jobs that had lower status and lower pay, Hall said.

"Life doesn't always work out the way you might like," he said. "You learn to hold rivets."

Staff writer Tom Bell can be contacted at 791-6369 or at:

tbell@pressherald.com