July 2011 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 7. 40 YEARS AND COUNTING AT MMM - NATHAN LIPFERT


BATH – Today it is very unusual that anyone stays in one job for their entire career. How- ever, if you are fortunate enough to find a job that you love to do the decision to remain for as long as possible is easy to make. One such fortunate person is Nathan Lipfert, who has been at the Maine Maritime Museum (MMM) in Bath for 40 years and still count- ing.


Lipfert was born in Connecticut, but moved to Woolwich in 1963 when he was 12. He added, “I was living in the area when the museum was started and that was a big thing to me because my folks always took us to maritime museums.”


Lipfert said that his father had a lot of interests and one of them was maritime his- tory. When his father was a young man the whaling vessel CHARLES W. MORGAN was being brought to Mystic Seaport. Lipfert added, “He was standing on the bridge at Mystic as it came through taking pictures.” Living in Connecticut of course he vis- ited Mystic Seaport and young Lipfert thought that that was just fabulous to go on board a whaling ship. He continued, “I had made plans to run away from home as soon as I turned 12 and become a cabin boy. My father took us to maritime museums a lot after that. We went to New Bedford, Nantucket, Peabody, Salem, and the Penobscot Marine Museum and as soon as there was a Maritime Museum in Bath we went there.” Lipfert explained the founding of MMM, saying “It was started by seven guys. Their intention was to support Mark Hennessy, who was a newspaper reporter for the Port- land paper based here in Bath. He was re- searching maritime history and his plan was he was going to retire from the newspaper and go full time into researching and writing about local maritime history. That was 1962. They call their organization the Marine Re- search Society of Bath. They went along happily and a couple of years later they started to have an increase in people joining the organization. Some people who came in thought this was a great thing and while we are at it, let’s have a museum too. I think the original seven guys were not really interested in that, although one or two of them might have been. In 1964, there were enough people in the organization that wanted a maritime museum that they started one. There was tons of stuff around here. Every attic was full of old maritime things. They had quite a display down in an old furniture store. Then one of the Sewall family members donated them a house at 963 Washington Street. They filled the house with exhibits, almost every room.


“When I was fifteen I volunteered one summer,” said Lipfert. “I came in a day or two a week and helped them begin cataloging stuff. I didn’t know anything about museum work, but I knew about sailing ships. I usually described items in way more detail than it needed to be.”


In 1969, Lipfert graduated high school and headed off to college at Hofstra Univer- sity on Long Island, New York. He said, “I graduated high school with the intent of becoming a biologist. It never occurred to me that you could actually make a living working in a museum. I didn’t even think about mu- seum work and no one suggested it to me. I didn’t even last the first year of college. It was very exciting times on college campuses in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and I somehow lost interest altogether in the college thing so I dropped out and lived with my parents for a little while. I also started talking to Dr. Charlie Burden, whom I knew was involved at the museum and he hired me to do a temporary job. They needed somebody to carry the entire contents of the research library down into the new vault that they had built under-


ground. I stayed in touch and the following year they decided they could use somebody for exhibit help over the summer. They hired me for the summer just doing anything. I actually took my girlfriend Jeanine at the time to the museum kind of on a date, she was very surprised, but she married me anyway. She was going to go back to school at Orono and we were going to move there and I was going to find a job. We didn’t pull the timing right and she ended up not having a space in the class so we stayed. In the fall, the person who was the acting director at the time, Bud War- ren, came to me and said ‘Nathan, we have been talking over on the board and you can stay.’ It wasn’t a great deal of money, but it was more than minimum wage so I stayed.” For the first few years a person on the Board took responsibility for running the day to day operations of the museum. The ApprenticeShop came in 1972 and the follow- ing year the museum received its first profes- sional director, Ralph ‘Lin’ Snow. The mu- seum also continued to expand. Lipfert added, “That first summer I worked here was the first summer that they opened the Percy & Small Shipyard buildings to the public even though they didn’t own the property yet.” The Shipyard property had been used by local people interested in building and rebuilding vessels. Lipfert said that the Donnells had rebuilt MARY E. on this site in the 1960s. That vessel is still around and Lipfert thought that she was the oldest Bath built wooden vessel left. CATHERINE L. BROWN, an Essex built fishing schooner, also was acquired by one of the Donnells. He was going to rebuild it, but she sank in a storm while tied to the outfitting wharf. She was sold and when they tried to raise her, her back broke and they removed her with a clamshell. Another group rebuilt the RICHARD ROBBINS there. There were plans to build a new schooner, which was built of ferro ce- ment there. She was RACHEL & EBENEZER, and her launching was a long slow, miserable wet rainy process. Lipfert added, “They had built this very rudimentary set of ways to carry it into the water and it slipped off. It didn’t really quite float at high tide and had to be pushed off.”


Lipfert was the assistant curator until 1984. He said, “Ultimately I went back to school and got my bachelor’s degree from Vermont College with kind of a maritime his- tory concentration. As soon as I had that I was promoted to curator. I stayed as curator


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Nathan Lipfert of Maine Maritime Museum at his desk in the library.


until ’88 at which time they split the job in half and I chose to stay with the library side rather than with the exhibit and collections side. They hired Bob Webb to be the curator of the exhibits and three dimensional collections.” Remembering the tug SEGUIN Lipfert explained, “That went over great in the ‘70s when there was lots of government money available for projects like that. It seemed like it was going pretty well and things got done on the vessel at least until it was hauled out here at the museum. They set up an appren- tice program to work on it and that did all right for a while. Then it seemed to kind of stall out. When Lin Snow left the museum, around ‘80 or ‘81, the momentum for the project just died. There were a lot of volunteers that were still interested in it, but people on the staff didn’t have a great deal of time to devote to it and so it fell by the wayside. The interim director wasn’t very interested in it and when John Carter was hired, he didn’t have much interest in the project and he ultimately made the decision to pull the plug. In ‘88 the vessel was broken up, but we salvaged some significant portions of it, which we still have.” Over the years there have been some very interesting projects and exhibits over- seen by Lipfert. He said, “I did an exhibit on the American shipyard worker; an exhibit on the building of a wooden ship in the shipyard buildings here at Percy & Small yard that I


designed and built completely on my own; and the lobstering exhibit. About that same time, I developed a relationship with George McAvoy so that the SHERMAN ZWICKER, a fishing schooner, came here every year. I did the exhibit for that vessel.”


In the late 1980s MMM built the new main building and that came along during the transition between Bob Webb and Lipfert. Lipfert said, “We had to have the exhibits well underway before Bob got here so I actually was the first curator for the exhibits in this building. This is a 30,000 square foot building with 10,000 square feet of exhibit space. Even though we hired an exhibit designer to do the design and they hired the fabricators to build all the cases and panels and do all graphic


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