July 6th The "lost" schooners of Wiscasset

As luck would have it, I was reviewing my Field Trip app on my phone last night, and it shared with me the story of the "lost" schooners of Wiscasset-  great little story.

The “Lost Schooners” of Wiscasset

Photo from 1968

Here they are, on the town's police patch

Hesper and Luther will be missed. For many folks, the little riverside village of Wiscasset just won’t be the same without the familiar old salts sitting side by side down by the banks of the Sheepscot. Where did they go? Well, in a sense, like Douglas MacArthur’s famous old soldiers, they just “faded away”—and thereby hangs a tale.

The names I just mentioned are not those of venerable senior citizens (although, in some sense, perhaps they might as well be). Nope, Hesper and Luther are (or were) a pair of aging coastal schooners, The Hesper and The Luther Little, which for the better part of a century sat abandoned in the mudflats at the western end of the Wiscasset bridge.

The hard truth is that the age of sail, that halcyon era when proud, square-rigged schooners crowded the shipping lanes, lines taut, sails billowing, hauling Maine timber, ice, and sardines to distant ports, ended not with a whimper but with a bang—the bang of a steam engine. Almost overnight these graceful wooden-hulled “ladies of the sea” were just plain obsolete, eclipsed by steam-powered vessels, capable of making deliveries on time with or without a stiff breeze.

Up and down the Maine coast, hundreds of these once proud vessels were unceremoniously (and illegally) dumped in the nearest harbor or along a riverbank. For many they were just a nuisance and a hazard to navigation. But they were too big to haul off, and where would you put them, anyway? Who would pay for the job? So these ships just sat rotting away in the mud, looking about as romantic to the locals as a pair of abandoned Chevys rusting on the front lawn.

Fortunately, the tourists saw them in a different light. Painters and photographers started coming around to capture their salty essence, Charles Kuralt featured them in one of his famous “On the Road” stories for CBS News, and before you knew it, a major tourist attraction had been born. The image of the abandoned schooners soon became pretty much the official symbol of Wiscasset.

A restaurant called Le Garage opened on the riverbank, and its menu featured a sketch of Hester andLuther. It was always a big deal to get there early enough to claim a choice table overlooking the hulking barnacle-clad derelicts. Postcards and note cards and T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the schooners flooded the town. Even the town seal, reproduced on official stationery and emblazoned on the doors of local police cruisers, features Wiscasset’s famous senior citizens.

Naturally, you want to go take a look at them, right? Sorry ’bout that! You see, while folks were busy cranking out postcards and T-shirts and menus and knickknacks of the schooners, the actual ships themselves were doing the only thing they could do under the circumstances. They were rotting away.

Mercifully, the end came quickly. Following a particularly blustery midnight storm back in the mid-1990s, early-morning commuters, lobstermen heading out to tend their traps, and everybody else who glanced in their direction got a rude shock. The schooners, which had sat there for almost a century, were gone. Just gone.

Don’t take it too hard, though. Wiscasset still bears the ghostly imprint of these famous wrecks, and as long as there are tourist dollars to be snagged, you’ll still be able to buy a nice set of note cards with a sketch of The Hester and The Luther Little on them. There is also one other plus: As you travel around Maine, you’ll notice that the natives have an irritating habit of giving directions based on landmarks that no longer exist. So don’t be surprised if, when asking a local for directions to Fort Edgecomb, he says, “Drive down to Wiscasset, then cross the bridge right where them old ships used to be . . .” Call me romantic, but I say there’s something kinda comforting in knowing that Mainers will still be using these old salts as a landmark a century or two after they gave up the ghost.

The Wiscasset Schooners

The four-masted schooners Hesper and Luther Little were laid up at Wiscasset in 1932. Here they remained, rotting and becoming tourist attractions, until thier hulks had deteriorated into eyesores. In 1998 they were demolished.

Luther Little was built in 1917 at by Read Brothers Co., Somerset, MA. She worked both in a coastal and deep-water trades early in her career. In 1920 she grounded in Haiti, remained stuck for two weeks, and nearly became a loss. In the end she was gotten off without serious damage. By the mid-1920's the 1234 ton (GRT) schooner was laid up. In June of 1932 she was auctioned to a Mr. Frank Winter, who had her towed to Wiscasset and laid up alongside the railroad wharf. She never moved again.
Hesper was built by Crowninshild Shipbuilding, South Somerset, MA. Her career started poorly, as the launching ways collapsed beneath her on launching day, 4 July 1918. New ways were built and she finally reached the water on 23 August. The 1348 ton (GRT) schooner made several lengthy voyages, including runs to Spain and Venezuela. In 1925 she grounded while entering Boston and required nine tugs to free her. Sometime in the following years she was laid up at Rockport, Maine. In January of 1928 she got loose in a storm, demolished a wharf, and landed on the beach. She was hauled off and eventually ended up in Portland, still laid up. In June of 1932 she was sold to Frank Winter for $600. She was towed to Wiscasset, arriving 1 September 1932 to join Luther Little.
Mr. Winter had purchased the schooners, and the insolvent Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington narrow-gauge railroad, to operate a Boston-to-Wiscasset coal and lumber business. The schooners would bring coal north to Wiscasset and return south with lumber, while the railroad shuttled coal and timber between Wiscasset and interior points in Maine. Sadly, this plan never became a reality, due to Mr. Winter's untimely death. Both the railroad and the schooners were abandoned where they lay.
Time soon began to tell on the old schooners, and Hesper's masts were cut down around 1940. Her aft deck house was burned to celebrate the end of WWII; her forward deckhouse met a similar fate in 1978. Fire was a continual threat to these ships, and they both suffered numerous fires. Firefighting was nearly impossible due to the ships' inaccessibility, but the Wiscasset Fire Department made a valiant effort each time. To the delight of tourists, the ships retained their shape for many years. Each year the hulks were a bit more run down, but through the 1980's they were still recognizable as ships.
In the early 1990's the elements finally took control over the hulks. One winter saw Hesper's hulk disintegrate into an unrecognizable mound of debris. A storm in 1995 took Luther Little's remaining masts, and the rest of her hull began to collapse. Around this time talk of "preservation", a constant issue for many years, came to the forefront. Before anything could be down, however, Luther Little's hull finally gave up and collapsed into a heap of debris. With the ships reduced to unsightly piles of rubble, there was little choice but to demolish the wrecks. This work took place in the spring and early summer of 1998. Certain items from the ships - masts, hardware, and identifiable wooden items - were saved, but the rest was dredged out of the river and hauled away to be dumped. Maine's most famous schooners had ceased to exist.