New England & the East Coast

Two traditions grew here side by side and mostly ignored each other. One was commercial: the Gloucester schooner fleet, the most dangerous fishery in North America, which killed men in numbers and in return produced the most refined working sailing craft ever built in the United States. The other was scientific: Nathanael Herreshoff at Bristol, tank-testing hull forms and building in bronze and steel while everyone else was still carving half models by eye.

They met in one place — the International Fishermen's Trophy, raced between Gloucester and Lunenburg from 1920. That was the last time working boats raced for something that mattered, and the fact that Bluenose was purpose-built to win it is the sign the tradition was already ending.

The design offices are the region's real export. Alden, Sparkman & Stephens, Burgess, Rhodes, Crowninshield, Mower, Hand — between them they drew a large fraction of what America sailed for fifty years, including the Bird class that started on San Francisco Bay. The yards that built for them are less famous and less well recorded: Lawley at Neponset, Nevins at City Island, Quincy Adams, Rice Brothers, Luders at Stamford. Most are gone. The exceptions — Hodgdon, in business since 1816, and Brooklin Boat Yard, founded by Joel White in 1960 — are why Maine is still where you go to have a wooden boat built.