Spring 2001 Newsletter
What's Happening Around the Shop
Maine Boat Builder's Show
Again this year Lowell's is exhibiting at the Maine Boat Builders's Show in Portland, now in its fourteenth season. This is the best place on the East Coast to meet and talk to real boat builders, not purveyors of mass productions, and it's always a thrill to see how much building is still going on in traditional ways with traditional materials.
This is Lowell's third year in a row. In both most recent shows Lowell's has written orders for boats for those appreciative of fine craft. You'll find our exhibit in the same place as last year, just inside the entrance to the left. Look for the crowd of afficionados gathered around a 14-foot Amesbury skiff or the Lowell's kayak.
The show is on the Portland Waterfront for three days, March 23-25. Exhibits are open 10-6 Friday and Saturday and 10-4 Sunday. Drop in and say hi to Mike and others from Lowell's.
Lowell's Livery Rows On!
The public and members again have the opportunity to row a variety of Lowell's boats through the 2001 season. The program was a great success last summer and is expanding further this year.
If you didn't have the chance last year to check out the livery, stop by the Boat Shop this summer and learn what it's like to row these beautiful boats on a scenic stretch of the Merrimack River. Available in the livery are a range of boats from a 12-foot pram to various sizes of rowing skiffs, all the way up to 20-foot Banks dories.
The livery is open to the general public from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, Thursday and Friday 4 to 7 pm, and Saturday and Sunday 1 to 7 pm. Occasional rowers can take out a boat for an hourly fee, but becoming a member offers added benefits. Members have unlimited rowing during supervised hours and a season that lasts through the fall until the docks come out. Almost every weekend morning there will be members-only guided rowing trips to nearby special destinations. Individual memberships ($100 for season) include guest privileges, and with a family membership ($175) all qualified family members have unlimited access.
New in the livery in 2001 the chance to sail a surf dory! (See related story.)
Livery Sets Sail!
The Lowell's Boat Shop Livery beginning this year will offer one or more sailing boats for use by livery members and the general public.
Paul Sylva of Rockport, Mass., donated a 20-foot mahogany sailing surf dory to the shop. The dory was built at Lowell's in the early 1980s and is in sound shape and watertight except for areas of finish needed. George Axelson, a volunteer at the Boat Shop, has been refinishing this sailing dory, which will enter the livery this season. It has a traditional working sail rig and sails well. Boat shop manager Mike Browne has already used it to give private sailing lessons (available as time allows, by appointment) and youth classes.
A second sailboat will likely also be added to livery from the spring boat building class.
E.J. Hampson: Third-Generation Shop Employee
Starting work at Lowell's Boat Shop early in 2001 is EJ Hampson, who follows in the footsteps of her grandfather, Sam Smith, a boatbuilder who worked at Lowell's from 1910 through 1963.
She also follows her father, Roland Smith, who assisted the builders in the 1930s and 40s, her great uncle Enoch Smith, and three of her uncles, who also worked in the shop at one time or another. Several of her uncles went on to build boats in other shops. Before her father passed away in 1999, he visited Lowell's one last time, and EJ remembers him saying he wished the family was still involved in the shop. It was for him a great source of family pride.
EJ herself as a child spent a lot of time visiting her grandfather here in the 1950s and early 60s. As a young girl in a shop then operated by men, she didn't become involved in the boat building herself but remembers hanging out in the paint shop downstairs while she waited for him. She always loved being at the shop, however, and seeing the boats and hearing the stories her grandfather and father told.
She remembers her father describing how he'd go with Tink Lowell down to Maine to pick out the trees to be cut and milled for the shop. She remembers endless stories about the boats themselves, through all the good and not-so-good years at the shop, decade after decade. She remembers reading her grandfather's name in a Yankee magazine article about Lowell's in 1962 and again in a National Geographic piece. From age 6 or so she has felt connected to the shop.
After an early adult life away, EJ moved back to New England in the mid 1980s and settled in Maine, where her husband too surprise, surprise! builds boats. She got involved again with the shop in the early 1990s and helped with fund raising. In late 2000, while working in Massachusetts, she started coming by the shop on weekends to help out as a volunteer, and during this time she got started with her idea of writing a book about the shop's history, focusing on the boat builders. She's been collecting oral stories, old photos, and other documents as she gathers the research. Anyone reading this who has been connected with the shop in the past is welcomed to stop by and meet her and tell their stories to add to the history.
Finishing her masters degree in nonprofit agency management at the University of Southern Maine, EJ is a natural for the part- time position in which she is now employed part-time at Lowell's. She doesn't build or finish boats, she says, but she'll do almost everything else to support the shop's operations, including grant writing, publicity, marketing, and development of programs for the public. Her home remains in Downeast Maine, but she commutes in for about four days every other week.
EJ brings not only many important skills to her position at Lowell's she also brings a great enthusiasm for the shop and another link with its long history. "We're really lucky to have her," says Mike Browne, boat shop manager, but with her long family connection to the shop, it seems luck may not be the right word. It's enough to make you believe in fate.