historical detective work

Hallowell historian Ron Kley recounts a story of teh connection of Hallowell to our ship USS Contitution, “Old Ironsides”:

We found a 1796 letter among the Charles Vaughan papers at Bowdoin (Charles was Benjamin Vaughan’s younger brother ) that had been written to Charles, in Boston, from John Sheppard in Hallowell. (Sheppard was a British expatriate who managed a brewery, a warehouse, a wharf and probably a distillery for Charles, all in Hallowell.

This letter reported among other things that “the mast for the frigate” was ready for shipment.

There were six frigates then under construction for the navy at various shipyards, and we had no clue as to which one “the mast” might be intended for.

Several years later I attended a museum conference that was also attended by Anne Grimes Rand, the director of the USS Constitution Museum, whom I knew from work that I had done for that museum years earlier. I asked her if she had any knowledge of where the masts for the Constitution had come from. She didn’t, but said that she would pass the inquiry along to the museum’s historian.,

I had a call from the historian just a day or two later, telling me that the museum had records of the navy having purchased both the mainmast and the bowsprit of the Constitution from somebody named Charles Vaughan.

We have no proof as to just where the trees were cut, but the odds are that if they were awaiting shipment from Hallowell, they would not have been hauled very far to Vaughan’s wharf on what’s still known as Sheppard’s or Shepard’s Point, just south of the confluence of Vaughan Brook and the Kennebec, There’s a good likelihood, if not a probability, that the trees were cut in Hallowell, and perhaps even on the Vaughans’ land, including the present Vaughan Woods, from which it would have been downhill all the way to the Vaughan wharf.

I showed the thick base of a huge eastern white pine and had the top of the tree showing at the top of the mural.

artist, Chris Cart

eastern white pine

I’ve been a sailing ship buff since I was a kid building scratch models of sailing ships. This was good enough for me. How could I not include “Old Ironsides” in our Hallowell mural.

artist, Chris Cart

The eastern white pine was a very valuable tree in the early days of the new nation. The eastern white pine is a very tough and tall tree that was early prized for its use a tall straight masts for ships.

It is said that early precolonial forests contained eastern white pines that grew to more than 70 meters or 230 feet in height.

Mast pines

During the 17th and 18th centuries, tall white pines in the Thirteen Colonies became known as “mast pines”. Marked by agents of the Crown with the broad arrow, a mast pine was reserved for the British Royal Navy. Special barge-like vessels were built to ship tall white pines to England.

By 1719, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had become the hub of pine logging and shipping. Portsmouth shipped 199 masts to England that year. In all, about 4500 masts were sent to England.

The eastern white pine played a significant role in the events leading to the American Revolution. Marking of large white pines by the Crown had become controversial in the colonies by the first third of the 18th century. In 1734, the King’s men were assaulted and beaten in Exeter, New Hampshire, in what was to be called the Mast Tree Riot. Colonel David Dunbar had been in the town investigating a stock pile of white pine in a pond and the ownership of the local timber mill before caning two townspeople. In 1772, the sheriff of Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, was sent to the town of Weare to arrest mill owners for the illegal possession of large white pines. That night, as the sheriff slept at the Pine Tree Tavern, he was attacked and nearly killed by an angry mob of colonists. This act of rebellion, later to become known as the Pine Tree Riot, may have fueled the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

After the Revolutionary War, the fledgling United States used large white pines to build out its own navy. The masts of the USS Constitution were originally made of eastern white pine. The original masts were single trees, but were later replaced by laminated spars to better withstand cannonballs.

In colonial times, an unusually large, lone, white pine was found in coastal South Carolina along the Black River, far east of its southernmost normal range.[citation needed] The king’s mark was carved into it, giving rise to the town of Kingstree.

excerpt from Wikipedia about Pinus Strobus, the eastern white Pine.