Dory Building at Lowell’s Boat Shop

Simeon Lowell bought a property at Point Shore on the Merrimack River in 1793. The deed describes him as a boat builder. Lowell tradition says he was a shipbuilder and probably had been to sea as well. Ralph Lowell is a direct descendant of Simeon, always known as "good old Simmie." Ralph, is the 7th generation of Lowells to own and operate the Shop. He says that Simeon wanted a better boat than the one he had, which was a wherry. A good rowing boat was required in the 3-knot current of the Merrimack River, and going out over the bar to fish required a seaworthy craft.

The boat he designed was lightweight and quite easy to handle and was extraordinarily good in surf. It had characteristics of the "bateaux" which were being used by the French in the waterways of the northern part of the country. These "bateaux" were built with wide boards for the lap strakes, sawn thin enough to be worked without steaming. They had been used by the French in the waterways of the northern part of the country, were flat bottomed and up to 35 feet in length. They were straight-sided with a good deal of flair. In 1756 Governor Shirley of Massachusetts established a "Battoe" Service under General Braddock to build these boats for use against the French in Montreal and Quebec, and the Service built thousands of them.

Records show Simeon's uncle, Gideon Lowell, served there and Ralph Lowell says that other Lowells went and were gone for years. They undoubtedly brought back not only ideas for the design of a rowing boat but also the idea of mass production used to build them. Simeon called his first boat a wherry, the boat used at the time. These were round-sided, with a flat bottom instead of a keel. He probably built it in a shop at the back of his house. Ralph tells us that every man had a shop at the back of his house, and we know that many men built their own boats. Simeon's had round sides, was flat-bottomed and had a high double-ended shape. The transom was raked. It is possible that he had sailed in European waters and seen this shape there. The Scandinavians used it, the Venetians still do, and Portuguese fishermen also used boats with a high raked transom and bow.

What Simeon built, according to Ralph Lowell, "was a good safe boat, safe to use in surf at the bar and the saying was that the nice thing about the dory was that you'd never get drowned in one. It might scare you to death, but they always told the fishermen, "if you get caught in a storm away from your ship in a dory, lie down and ride it out because the odds that it will swamp and capsize are almost nil."

The seaworthiness of Simeon's dory was well demonstrated as it came in fully loaded over the Merrimack River bar, and beginning in 1795, James Phillips, fisherman of Swampscott, and later his son Eben, were coming to the Lowell Shop for dories to use there. The gentle slope of Swampscott's beach required the fishing schooners to anchor half a mile offshore and bring their catch in through the surf. Lowell dories were carried over land until about 1840 when production began in Swampscott. The round-sided surf dory has also been known as the Swampscott dory ever since that time.

The name "wherry" was replaced by the word "dory" during the 19th century. The definition is unclear. Robert K. Cheney says in his important book "Maritime History of the Merrimack: Shipbuilding" that "quite a number of ship carpenters at Salisbury Point are building wherries (dories, invented there), of which they turn out about ten a week. A very profitable business." Cheney's statement is in turn taken from a newspaper dated January 2, 1857. Evidently, at that time the term was interchangeable. The word "dory" is old. John Gardner in the "National Fisherman", August 1976, says it appears in a book "Capt. Urey's Travels" published in 1726 though Mr. Gardner asks "was it the boat we now have_". The name now, and certainly from the latter part of the 19th century, is used for a double ended boat, flat bottomed, with flared or rounded sides and a raked V ("tombstone") transom, the boat which is credited to Simeon Lowell and which he called a wherry.

Early in the nineteenth century, fishing methods began to change. The established method had been handling from the deck of the schooner. Then for reasons unknown to fishermen, they found their catch to be enormously increased by fishing in a small boat away from the schooner. In 1859 the "Barnstable Patriot" reported that the use of dories had become "quite general among the Grand Bank fishermen. Codfish will take a hook from a dory while they will not notice a hook from the vessel anchored within a rod of the boat." Lowell's dory was redesigned by straightening the frames and flattening the sides to a flared shape. This was even less expensive to produce than the original boat. It could be tricky to handle but fully loaded was immensely seaworthy. It could be stacked on the deck of a schooner five or six deep and could hold 4000 lbs. of fish. Schooners now went out carrying 12 or 24 dories on their decks.

Neil Duan described the way it worked. He wrote that one man went out in a 12' (17 l.a.a.) dory. He worked alone from dawn until dusk. If he found a good spot others followed, and there might be 600 dories around him. He used two lines. While one was over the side, he prepared the other, and he expected to fill about six boat loads in a day. At full tide his line was 900' long and he pulled the lines 75 times daily. The cod he was catching weighed about 50 lbs., and his lines were heavily equipped with fishing hardware. He fished throughout the winter on the Grand Banks and the hands of the fishermen were deeply torn and scarred.

Stan Grayson, researching an article on Lowell's shop in 1984, interviewed a 92 year old schooner captain in Gloucester. He asked him what dories he used. "We used Lowell dories. Wouldn't use anything else. They were the best. If you had a Lowell dory, you had a good dory." And Rev. Roland Sawyer speaks for all the boats built on the Point, "the men who went outside to fish from the mouth of the Merrimack River or who went off from the coast at Hampton and Rye all vowed the Salisbury Dory was the most seaworthy boat ever built."

The dory changed industry on Point Shore. Demand for dories was great, not because of the numbers used on the schooners, but because the life of the dory, tough as it was, was short. Today they last for a hundred years, but on the Grand Banks, smashed again and into schooners, their time of usefulness was reduced to about 2 years. So, on the Point, boat shops began to replace the shipyards as the major industry and as the boat building industry boomed, the shipbuilding industry continued to decline. "Guinea boats" of between 40 and 50 tons continued to be built here until the end of the 19th century.

Boat shops lined the Shore and the change must certainly have been welcome to the men who were now inside a heated building rather than outside working in the shipyards. And yet today, far from being a warm environment in which to work, Lowell's Shop is heated with a wood stove and wood furnace, which are started each morning. There is no insulation, few storm windows, and at times during the winter it is almost impossible to work for the first hour or so in the morning. Tools are warmed by the stove and the temperature stands at 50-55 degrees. Boats are and always have been built year-round and stacked outside. The Newburyport Daily News, March 16, 1935, carries a picture of dories stacked in the Kenniston Yard at the foot of Rocky Hill Road. Lumber had always been stacked outside for the shipyards, so that sometimes "the roads were almost impassable", and now outside the boat shops. Aubrey Marshall recalled that during World War II "we were even building boats in the road."

Dories of all sizes were built. William Morrill, next to the Dorr homestead on Dorr's Lane, built the big dories for St. Pierre and Miquelon, and delivered them to Boston, where they were shipped to those islands. Small, inexpensive skiffs were built, and one building experimented with shipping dories in sections to be assembled elsewhere. His customers however, took his patterns and went into the business of building his dories themselves.

After the Civil War recreational rowing appeared in America. Yacht and Rowing Clubs sprang up. In Amesbury the Wonnesquam Boat Club was built and the shops began building a variety of boats for the people who wanted to row and sail for fun: men in their boaters, women with parasols. Lowell built "a gentleman's rowing skiff" for this market. Summer camps, new ways for children to experience the out-of-doors, came into the American scene. Someone has called them America's contribution to education, and for teaching children how to handle themselves on the water, they needed a good, safe little rowing boat, and Lowell built them. They were in the catalog of the Boy Scouts of America for forty years, and the Shop shipped boats to the Scouts of America and of England too.

Lumber, essential to the building of boats had always been available. Originally it came from forests around Amesbury, then from areas up the Merrimack and Powow Rivers whence it was floated down. After dams were built and the forests cut over, starting about the middle of the 19th century, lumber was shipped by rail from Maine and brought on the Salisbury Point spur built specially to bring lumber to the Shops. Today, white pine is again coming from new growth in the forests of Massachusetts and Maine, as well as New Hampshire, and is delivered by truck. Mahogany comes from Central America and Brazil, and Sitka spruce from the Northwest. Pine is stacked and dried in the loft, and oak was stacked on the bottom floor and dried slowly to keep it from checking. This is still done today. Since 1641 there had been sawmills, there was one on Rocky Hill Road back of the present church building, powered by True's pond and after the invention of steam, a steam-powered planing mill was built for the boat shops on the Point by Frank Flanders and George Henry Morrilll.

Initially nails were wrought iron made by the local blacksmith. In 1795 the first nail making machine in the United States was built in this area by Jacob Perkins. It supplied cut nails for building dories. When galvanizing (zinc coating) was developed, galvanized nails were used. Atlas Tack Co. of New Bedford, Mass. produced the most satisfactory clinch nail for use in the boat shops from the turn of the century until the mid-60's when Atlas was acquired and phased out of business. Fortunately, two of the cut nail machines were acquired by a retired naval officer who recognized their worth. He donated these to the boat shop of the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. Mystic Seaport, boatbuilder Peter Culler and a number of other boat builders, including Lowell's then joined in an effort to put these machines into production again. Lowell's Boat Shop gave them an order for nails to be made of copper. From the early days, Lowell's imported its steel tools from Sheffield, England. Warren Mann reports that when his father was building boats at Lowell's before electricity came to Amesbury (about 1914 he believes), Marcus Lowell had a very nice business sharpening saws for the boat shops, a task he had to perform at night.

According to Aubrey Marshall, in the early 20^th century the shop used an assembly line to produce dories in volume. The shop was organized to accommodate a smooth flow of lumber and boats throughout the site. Lumber was stored in sheds on the down stream end of the property. It was moved to the attic prior to use. Skillets were assembled and beveled on the second floor. Laps were beveled and installed in an adjacent area. The boats were then carried on exterior ramps down to the first floor to the finishers. The finishers cut the risings, installed cleats, caulked seams and smoothed out the inside timbers. The finished boats were taken to the basement where they were painted with a white lead, linseed oil and powder mixture. Once dry, they were taken out on the bulkhead area to be shipped by water, road or rail to their destination.

As the output of dories grew, a system of piecework developed. Aubrey Marshall, shop foreman for many years and boat builder for about 50 years until 1973 said he never saw it in his day, but understood that when a carpenter began to clinch nails at one end of a lap, the foreman might light a match. The lap was finished before the match went out. Warren Mann, son of Herbert, remembers how it was when his father worked at Lowell's shop, from 1890 when he was 11 or 12 years old and until he was nearly 70. The picture is as he remembers it was when he was growing up. He worked for awhile at Lowell's as a teenager in around 1916.

The men worked from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., 6 days a week. Dinner hour was from 12 to 1. Herbie lived nearby and Mrs. Mann had his dinner ready at 12 noon sharp. At 12:30 he lay down and rested for almost a half hour, and was back on the job at precisely 1 o'clock. Fred A. ("Tinky") Lowell was a 'hard master', Warren remembers, 'a businessman all the way through'. Five minutes was allowed to cross the street for water. And when the roof of the outhouse leaked it was not repaired. Tinky didn't use it since he lived across the street. But once he did so, and the men united their efforts and poured gallons of water on the roof. Nothing was said, but the roof was repaired the next day. "He was good though" Warren says. His father restored, modernized and enlarged the house they lived in, the house shown on the map as that of W.H. Blaisdell. Herbie came home almost every day with a good piece of lumber not usable for boats, and Tinky never charged him for any of it.

Herbie's wages never exceeded $18 a week, and his son says he worked every moment of his life. Six days a week at the Shop, and the rest of the time at home. He was the dean of the Boat Shop. Warren says his father could make a stem with an adz. "He could shave you with it," he says. During World War I wages in Portsmouth at the Naval Shipyard were treble those at Lowell's and it was suggested Herbie take a job there. He judged this unsound. The work at Lowell's was steady, and since there was no viable transportation, he would have had to stay in Portsmouth all week.

Towards the end of the century, Lowell was shipping boats in 100 lots to France, Portugal, the Azores, and the Northwest. Production peaked in 1911 at 2029 dories, and the record for speed was the order for 200 dories for the Portugal fisheries filled by Fred A. Lowell, Ralph's grandfather, in 16 days. We don't have a financial statement for the firm, but the Stevens Duryea that Fred A. Lowell was driving in 1911 suggests that Lowell's was a profitable enterprise. This is the same Fred Lowell who on occasion delivered a string of dories to Portsmouth or Gloucester, smoking a big cigar as he rowed. He returned by train.

Although some dories were rowed to their customers, the practice was to deliver by wagon to nearby buyers. The Moulton brothers lived on the other side of the River and hauled them to Gloucester and Portsmouth, 12 to a load, stacked catty-corner. When Lowell had a load ready, he hung overalls outside the Shop, one for one wagonload, two for two, hung at the east end for a Gloucester trip, west end for Portsmouth. The driver could deliver his load, visit the local bar, and sleep all the way home. People in Essex claimed that when a load of dories passed through, it would rain the next day.

Dory was King on Point Shore in 1913. Boat shops lined the river front and there were shops on side streets as well. Then customs duties in Europe seriously cut orders from abroad. The United States imposed duties as well, but the fishing fleet, always ready as any business to cut costs, found that boat builders in Nova Scotia could build a heavier, cruder version of Lowell's dory and sell it for less money. They would use it for a day, and bring it into the United States duty free. Dory sales were now mixed with sales of rowboats and skiffs, and when Ole Evinrude developed his outboard engine, Lowell modified the skiff to accommodate it. In 1929, Walter Lowell designed a transom well to house outboard engines in dories.

The beginning of the Great Depression. There were few jobs and few orders. The fishing fleets had begun to trawl with nets, and trawlers went out with two dories on the deck house for life saving purposes only, and since they weren't used, they lasted indefinitely. There were few re-orders. Luckily, fishing methods were slower to change in the Northwest, and dories continued to be shipped to the salmon and halibut fleets there until about 1940. The industry had been so seriously damaged, however, that in 1942 there were only 4 boat shops left.

Because of the dory's capability in the surf, the round-sided boat we call the surf dory was used by the United States Life Saving Service, later incorporated into the Coast Guard. This dory was used at its two worst stations, probably the mouth of the Columbia River and perhaps at Newburyport. The remaining stations used the Banks Dory. The boats were also used for life saving on the East and West Coast beaches until aluminum and fiberglass replaced the wooden boats in the sixties. We saw one of the old Lowell lifeboats in 1984 on Long Beach, California. The use of the dory was so widespread that Donald B. Macmillan, on his return from one of his expeditions to the North Pole, reported that his first sight of civilization was a Lowell dory drawn up on an ice floe, owned by an Eskimo.

During the Depression, however, there were years when the Shop operated only two days a week. And in 1936 the Merrimack River flooded. Ralph Lowell says that in the almost 200 years the Shop has been there, this was the only time there was water on the floor. At 6:30 a.m. water was slapping under the floor. At 7:30 they began moving the boats out; there were about 100 of them. The tide was rising one foot an hour, and when the river crested it had nearly reached the ceiling.

During the War, thousands of dories were delivered to the two Services. Walter Lowell, Ralph's father, had died at age 42 in 1933 and "Tinky", Ralph's grandfather, had taken over again. But when the War came, Ralph went into the Service and Aubrey Marshall ran the Shop. Production was wholly for the War. There were 15 men and they produced about 25 dories a week on an average. Twenty-four dories went to Alaska where they were used, two in tandem with planks across them, for heavy loads such as coal. In South Africa, Lowell dories went out to pick up mines laid by the German Navy along the East Coast to interfere with Allied oil shipments.

When the War ended Ralph Lowell planned a solid future for the Shop. He added a showroom at the upstream end of the the building, and departed from the established dory brown color of the building, painting it white. He had a good work force. Herbert Mann was there and Aubrey Marshall who had been there more than 25 years, Leon J. Ladd, more than 30 years, and Samuel F. Smith had been a boat builder for 43 years. There had been about 250,000 dories built and paint was up to 7" deep on the floor. Commercial fishing from dories was almost entirely that of clammers and moss gatherers now, but the Coast Guard and the beaches of the East and West Coasts used dories for life boats. There were still some boats built for Gloucester, but summer camps, particularly those of the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts of both America and England used the skiffs. Sample bills of lading in 1954 show 10 boats for a Boy Scout camp in Ohio, 8 for Illinois.

There were rental services and boat liveries everywhere using Lowell outboard and rowing skiffs. They were durable, and they were safe. As a livery owner in City Island in New York City said, "No matter what the weather, they always come back." Palmer Engine Company in Cos Cob, Connecticut, in conjunction with Lowell, built a hundred or so inboard fishing boats. And there were regular customers for the big 23-4' Ocean Skiffs. Nevertheless, Lowell recognized the wisdom of diversifying his product when he filled an order for 24 lawn chairs in 1953.

Commander Sheldon S. Kinney, of the U.S.S. Mitschner, began experiments in 1957 with the 18' dory as a life boat for the Navy, to replace the whaleboats they were using. Dories have been called the broncos of the sea, and Kinney had ridden them surfboard fashion through the surf as a boy in California. Captain Ben Pine, skipper of the last racing schooner, "Gertrude L. Thebaud" out of Gloucester estimated one minute to launch a dory while underway. The experiments were successful, but the project fell before the development of the new boat building materials, fiberglass and aluminum. These materials almost forced the last of the boat shops on Point Shore to close .

And at about the same time, Isbrandtsen, the line that shipped to the West Coast, refused any longer to take deck cargo, such as dories, through the Canal. Further, the railroads, which had been taking boats at the Salisbury Point spur and shipping them countrywide, now would accept only 100 lot shipments. Shipping had been cheap and efficient. A Boston and Maine bill of lading dated December 24, 1957, described two 19' dories and six pairs of oars, crated for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, the boats to be nested and secured. Must arrive Jan. 5, 1958." The charge was $347. B&M charged $32.17 to ship two uncrated skiffs to Tidewater, Virginia, that year. Following the loss of ship and rail service, delivery depended on the highly regulated trucking industry, and until deregulation during the Reagan Administration, it cost as much to ship a boat to Alaska as to build it.

As the shops closed, boat builders diappeared. Ralph was finding it difficult to fill the orders he did have. Fortunately for the Shop, Fred Tarbox came to work at Lowell's in 1959. He had been forced to seek employment elsewhere as the shops went out business, but had been a builder of boats for 20 years. He was, and is, an extraordinarily skilled craftsman. Fred can bevel a strake with the utmost simplicity of motion. He never wastes a movement; and when Jamieson Odell thought about buying Lowell's, it could only be on the condition that Fred remain. He did remain, and has taught the young boatbuilders there to build dories. Ralph Lowell undertook to teach a boatbuilding class at Whittier Technical High School in Haverhill to keep the craft alive during the early 1970s.

An abortive effort was made in about 1973 by Mystic Seaport in Connecticut to take the entire Shop by barge to Mystic, and after this project was abandoned, Strawbery Banke, the restoration project and museum in Porstmouth, NH, approached Ralph with a plan to produce a replica of Lowell's Boat Shop there. The project went through. Ralph turned over old tools and patterns, and Aubrey Marshall took over and began building dories there and teaching young men and women the art. Aubrey Marshall died in 1981 and Strawbery Banke has now closed its operation.

As Ralph Lowell and others were trying to save the Shop, interest in the wooden boat was appearing in another quarter. Jonathan Wilson launched "Wooden Boat" magazine in 1975. Its success has been phenomenal, and in 1984 it was the fastest growing specialty magazine in the country.

Ralph Lowell sold his shop to Jamieson Odell in 1976. Jim believed yachtsmen and connoisseurs would be in the market for these beautiful and proven craft, and he began to advertise in the new "Wooden Boat" magazine. He advertised in other publications, took his boats to boat shows and spent up to seven days a week following inquiries and trying to get production to a profitable figure. Interest in the Shop was strong. The Shop built a dory in City Hall in Boston as a part of the bicentennial celebration. It built four dories for the Maritime Museum in Newburyport as a featured display; and built a dory in the Lamont Gallery (Art) at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH.

Lowell's Boat Shop now produces its traditional flat bottomed dories ranging in size from 7' prams to 24' ocean skiffs. Some are equipped with engines or outboards, some with sails, or both. All are exceptionally easy to row, as they always have been, and when interest in rowing as recreation and exercise began to appear, Jim recreated the design and it is now known as the Salisbury Point Rowing Skiff, one of the Shop's most popular boats. Jim Odell introduced epoxy resin to seal the hulls on bottoms and garboards, with fiberglass cloth to strengthen the bottoms and decrease abrasion. The boats are also treated and finished with 12 coats of an oil preservative and finish. These changes have substantially reduced the maintenance problems that worried many wooden boat lovers.

Lowell's Boat Shop is unique, not only as the only remaining shop building essentially the same boat in the same way since its founding, but also in its original building on the same waterfront location. There are only a very few boat builders remaining in waterfront locations and their numbers are decreasing as waterfront property becomes scarcer. The rapidly increasing pressure of residential demand at tremendously inflated values presents an almost irresistible threat to the future of the Shop on Point Shore in Amesbury which, except for the Shop itself, is now entirely residential. The shop is now operated by the Newburyport Maritime Society as a charitable institution so that the tradition of dory building can be preserved at the shop.