Boston’s Wooden Shipbuilding Center

in East Boston

Samuel H. Pook was 23 when he designed Surprise, the first of several of his very fast clipper ships, and one of the most successful clippers in the China trade. Pook later became a naval architect for the U.S. Navy.

Surprise by Xanthus Russell Smitth, photo courtesy of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, National Park Service

In 1839, just six years after East Boston began to be developed as a neighborhood, Samuel Hall established a shipyard on this site. It grew to include dry docks that used the most advanced steam-powered technology and marine railways, still visible today along the waterfront. Among the 110 vessels Hall built here was Boston’s first clipper ship–Surprise. Her launch in 1850 was accompanied by church bells ringing. The names of some of Hall’s other vessels are engraved on the granite paving.

Hall’s shipyard was one of several along the stretch of the waterfront from here north to the Meridian Street Bridge, where Hall, Donald McKay, Robert Jackson, Paul Curtis, and others built world-famous ships. Spurred by the California Gold Rush and a demand for faster ships, they launched more than 200 vessels in 20 years.

Together with the Charlestown Navy Yard across the harbor and shipyards in South Boston, East Boston shipbuilders made the city one of the premier ship building centers in the country during the mid 1800s.

Samuel Hall portrait

Shipbuilder Samuel Hall

Sailing card advertisement for fearless

Sailing cards like this one for Fearless were widely used to advertise ship departures. Fearless, also designed by Pook, was built here by George Sampson, who leased part of Hall’s shipyard starting in 1852.

FDR's model of the ship surprise

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano, turned eight on the Surprise, en route to Hong Kong with her mother and six siblings. They joined Warren Delano, who was very active in the China trade for many years. FDR admired his family’s maritime history and owned two paintings and this model of the famous clipper ship, as well as the ship’s log of his mother’s trip.

Photo courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

Sign Location

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Swift, with long sharp bows and names like Chariot of Fame, Empress of the Seas, Flying Fish, Coeur de Lion, Staghound, and Lightning, “in every way clipper ships ranked among the most handsome vessels ever put afloat.” [1] Three-masted and square-rigged, clipper ships were unusual merchant vessels because they were designed for great speed rather than capacity. They sailed across oceans on
trade routes where speed translated into significant profit. In the China trade, an exceptionally fast clipper ship could beat the competition, bringing back tea from Guangzhou (formerly Canton to westerners) and fetching the highest prices. The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) and the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s spurred additional clipper ship construction.

Clipper ships set records: Flying Cloud–New York to San Francisco in 89 days, 8 hours; Sovereign of
the Seas 22 knots; Champion of the Seas 465 nautical miles in one day. No steamship of their day  could beat them. And no square-rigged ship has ever broken Flying Cloud’s record. Finally in the 1870s, with improved marine engines and boilers, steam-powered vessels broke clipper ship speed
records. [2] And so like the gold rushes themselves, the era of clipper ships was short-lived. Because the vessels carried such immense sail area, they required large crews, which added to operating costs. And the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 favored steamships. For many, clipper ships represent the
zenith of the age of sail. Their memory endures in books, paintings, and models.

lnw April 2018

[1] Howe, Octavius T. & Matthews, Frederick C. Matthews. American Clipper Ships 1833-1858. Dover Publications, Inc. reprinted from Publication Number Thirteen of the Marine Research Society, 1926-27.

[2] Clark, Arthur Hamilton. The Clipper Ship Era. G. P. Putmans’ Sons, 1911. link

George Lewis was a self-emancipated Black man who worked as a carpenter in Samuel Hall’s shipyard from 1847 to 1850. Lewis escaped from slavery in Virginia in 1846 and arrived in Boston in July of 1847 after a harrowing, 10-month journey north. He was introduced to Samuel Hall by Austin Bearse, a sea captain and abolitionist, and Hall hired him on the spot. As Bearse later recounted, Hall’s decision to hire Lewis was controversial: “Some of his ship carpenters left on account of it, but Mr. Hall kept George.”[1] Samuel Hall left no account of his thinking in hiring Lewis, but his friendship with Bearse and a longstanding neighborhood rumor that Hall’s house on Webster Street was a stop on the Underground Railroad suggest that he may have been sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause. Most of Lewis’ fellow shipyard workers were white New Englanders and Maritime Canadians. They were trained in an apprentice system that was largely closed to outsiders,[2] which makes Lewis’s success all the more extraordinary – in 1848 Lewis described himself as a “carpenter” in the City Directory, but by 1850, he was listed as a “shipwright,” one of the most skilled and highly paid jobs in the shipyard.[3][4] Lewis very likely helped build Massachusetts’ first clipper ship, the Surprise, launched from Hall’s shipyard in 1850.

George Lewis quickly built a life in Boston. In 1849, he bought a house near Hall’s shipyard at the corner of Havre and Porter Streets.[5] He became an early leader in Boston’s Twelfth Baptist Church, a Black congregation that was known as the “Fugitive Slave Church” at the time for its commitment to abolitionism and reputation for welcoming and assisting former slaves.[6] Lewis served as one of three trustees who secured land and financing to build the congregation’s first church on Beacon Hill.[7] In 1850, the US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required local authorities to return escaped slaves to their owners, even in free states like Massachusetts. Fearing for his safety, George Lewis fled to Canada with his family.[8] But it seems that he continued to think of Boston as home, and he moved back to East Boston with his family at the end of the Civil War, buying a new house on Chelsea Street in Day Square.[9]

Dan Bailey
July 2018

[1] Bearse, Austin, Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston. (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 12.

[2] O’Har, George Michael, Shipbuilding, Markets, and Technological Change in East Boston. (Doctoral Thesis, MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1995), 127.

[3] Adams, George, The Boston Directory: 1848-9. (Boston: James French and Charles Stimpson, 1848), 280.

[4] Adams, George, The Boston Directory: 1849-50. (Boston: James French, 1849) 189.

[5] Suffolk County, MA. Register of Deeds. Deed Book 600, Page 185.

[6] National Park Service, African American Churches of Beacon Hill. (2015) Retrieved from: https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/churches.htm

[7] Suffolk County, MA. Register of Deeds. Deed Book 605, Page 30.

[8] Bearse, Austin, Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston. (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 12.

[9] Suffolk County, MA. Register of Deeds. Deed Book 828, Page 2.

Although none of the grand sailing ships built in East Boston survive today, the craftsmanship of the carpenters, woodcarvers, and other workers who built these ships can still be seen in many of East Boston’s 19th century houses. Most shipyard workers were independent contractors, frequently moving from shipyard to shipyard to find work. When shipbuilding work was scarce, they occasionally found jobs building houses in the neighborhood. And when advances in railroads and steamships led to the collapse of East Boston’s wooden shipbuilding industry after the Civil War, many former shipyard workers transitioned to full time jobs in housing construction.

Samuel Manson and Seth Peterson were ship joiners, craftsmen who made cabinetry and other interior finishes for ships. They moved to East Boston in 1841 and set up shop across the street from Samuel Hall’s shipyard. But by the 1870s, Manson and Peterson were exclusively making fireplace mantels, trim, and doors for East Boston houses. The influence of shipyard workers on East Boston’s architecture continued long after most of the neighborhood’s shipyards had closed. In 1976, East Boston resident Janet Graves recalled how her grandfather, a former shipyard worker, oversaw the construction of her family home at 388 Meridian Street in the 1890s: “My grandfather, having been a shipbuilder, knew how things should be built and he watched every nail.” Even today, East Boston’s shipbuilding legacy lives on in the handsome trim and finely carved details that adorn the facades of many of the neighborhood’s Victorian houses.

Dan Bailey
June, 2018

The 19th century Boston directories, which list workers by occupation, provide a ready inventory of what skills were most utilized in East Boston shipyards. Work in the yard, generally, was divided into three main categories: shipwright/ship carpenter, caulker, or joiner.

Some workers identified themselves as ship carpenters, a skilled trade, but not as skilled as that of the shipwright, who would often work in the mould loft, converting drawings into frames, and making sure those frames were set properly. Caulkers used special mallets and chisels to force oakum into the seams of the hull and deck. When these seams were coated with tar, they became waterproof. Ship joiners built cabins, stairs, doors, and furniture.

Wooden vessels required thousands of holes to be bored, both for iron rods to hold the knees–crooked timbers acting as braces–to the frame, and for treenails (pronounced “trunnels”) to fasten planking to the exterior. Often, carpenters were called upon to do this. They might also be required to adze the exterior joints of the hull, or to act in the capacity of sawyers, hewing planks for logs. This was very heavy labor and the fact that the carpenter sometimes did work more often associated with workers of the lowest skill level in the yards, suggests, again, that the ship carpenter ranked below a shipwright in skill level. Nevertheless, the ship carpenter was a skilled craftsman who had learned his trade through a multi-year apprenticeship.

The caulker, a man of critical importance in the construction of a sailing vessel, often worked on his back under the belly of the vessel. Hammer noise was an occupational hazard in getting oakum into a seam, and men who did this work often became deaf. Their work was perhaps the most repetitive in the yard and required a good deal of physical strength. But for those who had the aptitude, it was one of the most prized and highly paid jobs in the yard, no matter how occupationally risky. In order for a ship to remain tight, caulkers had to do their jobs well. Lives depended upon them. But it was dreadful, tedious work.

Caulkers and joiners pursued specialized finishing trades, and were apt to move from one yard to another looking for ships near the finishing stage. A ship carpenter, or shipwright, tended to remain with a single yard while a ship was under construction. Once the work was done, however, he too would move along.

Excerpt from George O’Har. “Shipbuilding, Markets, and Technological Change in East Boston.” Doctoral Thesis, MIT, 1995.

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

  • Bunting, W.H. Portrait of a Port: Boston, 1852-1914. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1971.
  • Clark, Arthur. The Clipper Ship Era. G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1911.
  • Cross, Robert. Sailor in the White House: Seafaring Life of FDR. Naval Institute Press, 2003.
  • “East Boston Waterfront District Municipal Harbor Plan,” prepared by The Cecil Group for Boston Redevelopment Authority, May 2008.
  • Morrison, Samuel Eliot. The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961 edition.
  • Seasholes, Nancy & The Cecil Group. Sites for Historical Interpretation on East Boston’s Waterfronts. Boston: Boston Redevelopment Authority, 2009.
  • Seasholes, Nancy. Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
  • Sumner, William H. History of East Boston: With Biographical Sketches of its Early Proprietors, and an Appendix. Boston: William H. Piper and Company, 1858.
  • about Samuel Hall
  • FDR-Surprise link & Delano family China trade
  • FDR’s grandfather’s involvement in China trade; FDR Presidential Library & Museum and Hudson River Valley Heritage
  • about sailing cards

Acknowledgments

  • Translation and recording thanks to the generosity of the Boston Marine Society
  • Our gratitude to the Perkins School for the Blind and David W. Cook for their partnership in creating the audio files.