Percy & Small Shipyard
Library of Congress
South of Bath Iron Works on the Kennebec River is a three-acre lot that once was the home of one of Bath’s most prolific builders of large, wooden sailing vessels, the Percy & Small Shipyard. Now a part of the Maine Maritime Museum, it is the only surviving intact shipyard in the United States where large wooden sailing vessels were built.
Percy & Small was just one of many shipyards in Bath, whose nickname, “the City of Ships,” is not for nothing. But what sets it apart from all the other yards is that it produced some of the largest wooden sailing ships for the commercial trade ever built.
During the years the yard operated, between 1894 and 1920, forty-two of the forty-four vessels built there were four-, five-, and six-masted schooners. The most famous of these is the Wyoming. Built in 1909, the six-masted Wyoming was stem-to-stern 450 feet long – the largest known wooden sailing ship ever built.
By the time the yard closed, the era of large wooden cargo ships was over, outcompeted by steam and steel. The shipyard property languished, largely intact, until it was donated to the Maine Maritime Museum in 1975. The museum restored the shipyard’s landscape and five of its original buildings and recreated other elements, such as the blacksmith shop.
It is one thing to stand on the wooden planks in the shipyard’s mould loft where ship designs were drafted onto the floor and another to stand beside the enormity of one of its finished ships. To evoke that feeling, the museum returned the Wyoming to where it began its life.
The original Wyoming sank near Cape Cod in 1924 during a storm with all hands lost, but today a full-size metal outline of the schooner with six 134-foot flagpoles representing its masts stands where the vessel was built and launched.
