Category: shipbuilding village

I’m forging ahead on the idea of a village…like Old Sturbridge Village or King’s Landing…to recreate shipbuilding in the mid 1800s. Tonight I ordered some books on traditional shipbuilding:

“American Small Sailing Craft: Their Design, Development and Construction”
Chapelle, Howard I.

“Architectura Navalis Mercatoria: The Classic of Eighteenth-Century Naval Architecture (Dover Maritime)”
Chapman, Fredrik Henrik af

“A Practical Course in Wooden Boat and Ship Building”
Van Gaasbeek, Richard M

“Boatbuilding: A Complete Handbook of Wooden Boat Construction”
Chapelle, Howard I.

They are all going to my son’s place in the US to get cheaper…read free…shipping, so I can’t start reading them yet.

My current plan is to shift the focus from one large half-finished ship to perhaps constructing smaller work-boat-style vessels using traditional construction techniques and actually completing them…perhaps one a year. I suppose they will have to be finished with epoxy or other modern preservation coatings so they don’t rot out in 7 years like the original wooden ships of the 1800s! The advantage of smaller vessels would be both reduced cost and reduced labor…if the construction can still show the process as it was 150 years ago, it should suffice. I want to run it by the Lunenberg Shipyard Alliance for ideas.

As a member of the board of Wood Islands and Area Development Corporation I have listened as the board wrestled with issues relating to the closing of the liquor store (it now appears it will continue as an ‘agency store’ run by the corporation, but that is another story). What has come into my imagination is the idea of making…creating…made up of whole cloth…a shipbuilding village of the 1860s. Wood Islands has a marvelous resource in the lighthouse and park with a great view of the strait, the harbor, the ferries, and the fishing shacks.The dream is to save old buildings and move them to the area to create a village and represent the shipbuilding industry as it might have been at that time. 

I hope to produce a book outlining the dream and, just today had the idea of having shipbuilding take place on the park site in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the confederation in 2014. The project would aim to eventually become another King’s Landing, Sturbridge Village, or Upper Canada Village…a living history recreation.

But the reason I am posting under sailing is that I am hoping to draw on the expertise of some group like the Lunenburg Shipbuilding Alliance to create something that could represent real shipbuilding at that time. Authenticity to the period of course rules out epoxy and fiberglass! I am hoping to find some people who could create a shipbuilding process that wold not have to be hurried, as long as there could be some sort of activity for visitors to see every day. Whether a vessel of traditional plank and timber construction could find a market is a big question, but I suppose a first vessel could remain at the harbour for tours…perhaps we could fill up a harbour with vessels! Or another idea is to have life-sized, pre-cut pieces that could be assembled and then disassembled and re-used…sort of like big building blocks. Then the process could be illustrated over and over without producing a finished vessel that had to be fitted and used.

At this point the goal I have is to see if some living-museum activity could be funded for 2014 just sitting in the empty park.