Nautical Research Journal
7. A detail view of the schooner’s bow showing a suspension eye screw (leſt side of photograph) with a portion of the monofi lament line that suspends the model. A total of four eye screws (two fore and two aſt ) secure the model to a four-foot long wooden rod that can be easily lowered for an occasional cleaning.
Nineteenth-century East Coast schooners sailed a well-traveled track from Maine to Charleston, South Carolina principally and typically within sight of the Eastern coastline. Schooner commerce extended north to Halifax and even as far south as the Caribbean, but the principal routes of these early “energy haulers” were between the Chesapeake Bay and Boston and
especially New York’s harbors. Massive loads of coal from the mines in Virginia and Pennsylvania would be dumped into the holds of schooners headed north to New York and Massachusetts. Thus, much of the energy sources—and many building materials— literally fueled and built the many communities along the Eastern seaboard in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Although the discovery of oil in North America happened nearly a half-century earlier in Pennsylvania (in 1859), the United States was dependent upon coal to fuel industry and to heat homes economically. These were also the years in which railways still did not connect most of the Eastern seaboard and the rail lines that existed were mainly relied upon for passenger transport. Large commercial cargo ships, especially those that carried bulk goods, were in high demand, particularly vessels that could economically transport large cargos of coal, and a few years later, as domestic demand skyrocketed, raw lumber. The large sailing schooners—the last of a generation of commercial sailing ships—were critical to the development of America’s rapid rise as a world power in the early twentieth century.
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8. The four-masted schooner’s hull is fi lled, sanded and ready for painting. The model kit’s sail plan, rigging and belaying drawings were important to the model’s authenticity. From project inception, the model would feature seventeen set sails, a fi rst for the builder.
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