“Let’s Go Build a Boat in My Barn” – Part 1

by Laurie Schreiber

Roger Rich sawing frames for a 17th century reproduction shallop in 1956. Rich & Grindle built the shallop for the Mayflower project in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Photographer unknown. Courtesy The Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive/Plimoth Plantation.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Roger Rich and his friend Ralph Grindle founded Rich & Grindle Boatbuilders in 1946, building boats in Rich’s barn at Tracy Cove on Clark Point Road in Southwest Harbor.

The two men were in their early 30s and had been working for Henry Hinckley, who had major boatbuilding contracts with the military during World War II. After the war, the story goes, Rich and Hinckley had a falling-out. So Rich persuaded Grindle it was time to leave and start a new operation.

Their timing was excellent. Servicemen were returning to the Maine coast after the war, had money, and wanted new boats. Rich’s brother, Bob, had set up shop in nearby Bernard, and had more work than he could handle. Bob farmed out a contract to the newly established Rich & Grindle, to build a 32-foot lobsterboat for Vernon Dalzell of Frenchboro, for $2,500. That first boat, the Eva G., hit the water the following year.

In short order, Rich and Grindle were plenty busy. There were slack times, sure, when the two men took carpentry jobs and, at one point, laid linoleum, nights, for the Bass Harbor general store (they sold everything, groceries, clothes, linoleum) owned by Rich’s uncle-by-marriage, H.G. Reed. But orders kept coming in, both from high-end yachters and fishermen.

In 1950, Grindle fell ill and was unable to continue. Eventually, he went on to open Grindle’s Store, while Rich continued to build boats on his own. A distinctive project occurred in 1956, when Rich traveled to Massachusetts with another expert boatbuilder from Southwest Harbor, Francis “Mickey” Fahey, to build a replica shallop to accompany a reproduction of the Mayflower.

“Rog is a conundrum,” his Pemetic High School yearbook says. “You never know in what mood you’re going to find him, for his temper is as changeable as the weather. However, we can’t help liking him and no matter how angry he makes us, we always have to forgive him.”

Meredith Rich Hutchins, Roger’s daughter, says her dad probably “raised hell” in high school.

Hutchins is the keeper of her father’s history. She lives in Southwest Harbor and has been instrumental, with Charlotte Morrill, in compiling an electronic database of historic photos for the Southwest Harbor Public Library. With her family going back several centuries in the local community, Hutchins is passionate about the general community’s life and times.

Roger’s father, Clifton, was called “the Wizard of Bernard Corner” by one reporter for his lifelong production of small punts, dories, lobsterboats, and pleasure craft.

It’s pretty certain that Clifton never got to go to high school. But his talent showed early. He once told his grandson that ‘as a young man while on a trip in the schooner Idaho, the vessel was tied up to a wharf in Boston where he was caulking the deck. A man came by and watched him work and then said to Cliff, “A man’s a fool to go to sea when he can caulk like that.”

“ ‘And you know, he was right,’ Cliff said, so he came home and began to carpenter and build boats. He didn’t want to go to sea anyway, he said: ‘It was dangerous, the food was bad and it was a hard life.’ ”

Working in a small shop, Cliff got his first order to build a boat around 1910. A young woman named Elizabeth Farnsworth, who hailed from Cherryfield, a small town an hour away on the mainland, was teaching school in Tremont and boarding with Cliff’s sister. The two married in 1912 and a year later had twins, Roger and Ronald, followed by Bob. Their youngest was Cecil M. Rich. He came along nine years after Bob, in 1926, and died in 1941 at age 15, from leukemia.

In the foreground, Ralph Grindle at work in the Rich & Grindle Boatbuilding shop in Roger Rich’s barn at 48 Clark Point Road, Southwest Harbor. Courtesy Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive.

Hutchins recalls her teenage uncle. “I was two and a half years old at the time and can remember seeing him shortly before his death lying in a hammock on the porch at my grandparents’ house with a basket of fall apples nearby,” she wrote for the Tremont Historical Society newsletter.

At her home, recently, Hutchins brings out the 1931 yearbook and turns to page ten, where student headshots show her twin uncles as teens, Ronald in a bowtie and her father in round spectacles. Both wear a slight smile. The boys are pigeonholed under the heading of “commercial” rather than “college.”

“Ronald has no use for the girls whatever,” the yearbook editor wrote, and then warned, “Ronald, you’d better watch out in the future because that beautiful curly hair has a great attraction for the girls.”

“Ronald was probably the good student. My father got kicked out of his homeroom,” Hutchins adds. The Great Depression was on when the twins graduated. Jobs were few.

One summer, the three boys drew straws to see who would have to go to the local unit of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the federal public work relief program. Roger got the short straw. Hutchins wrote, “With no work available, the thirty dollars a month the government paid the men’s families made the difference between independence and going on the town.”

Rich had hoped to do carpentry work but was assigned to dig out stumps, and ended up mostly doing KP duty and peeling potatoes because he was always in trouble. “And it was some damn cold in the winter,” he once told his daughter.

Roger got out as soon as he could and did a lot of different things. He cooked for a local logging operation. In the late 1930s, he opened a gasoline station on the corner below his parents’ house. The business was not successful.

“When I asked my father why not, he said that it was probably because he accepted too many bushels of apples as payment for gas, a practice that couldn’t have helped his cash flow, especially during the depression,” Hutchins wrote. “Everybody did his best though, including my mother, who made fudge to sell there, and Mr. Roscoe Ingalls, Tremont summer resident, who liked to use high-test gasoline in his automobile and would buy an entire tankful at the beginning of the season, so it would be available whenever he wanted it.”

Roger’s younger brother, Bob, had opened a boat shop in 1939 on the Bernard shore, where he began a lifelong career. Roger did some work with Bob early on (Ronald worked with Bob a number of years before setting up his shop). He also worked next door at Hollis Reed’s general store; and did seasonal jobs, repairing and storing boats, for Hinckley and for Bink Sargent, who managed the Southwest Boat Corporation, the yard he and Hinckley bought together.

During the war, the three young men, then in their 20s, went over to Hinckley and Sargent, who needed all the craftsmen they could get to run the production lines.

Ralph Grindle, born in 1915, grew up on Deer Isle, thanks to the work his father found there cutting the world-famous pink-gray granite at quarries in the surrounding area. During the Depression, Grindle was a teenager going to high school in Stonington and working for the CCC in Southwest Harbor during the summer. Unlike Rich, he loved the camp.

“He told me that he just loved hanging out with the men,” says his daughter, RuthAnn “Sugar” Fenton, who lives in Lamoine. “They treated him well and he could do things for them, like a go-fer.”

Grindle arrived each summer on the steamer J.T. Morse, and stayed with relatives. He worked in the woods, drove a park truck and then became tool clerk, “which was best, because you were your own boss,” he once told Hutchins.

Grindle went on to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, stationed in the Hawaiian Islands. When he returned, he had three job offers – cut meat at the A&P in Rockland, work on a yacht on which his brother Steve was skipper, or take a job with Hinckley in the tool department. He chose the latter, and became foreman of the spar shop, in charge of splicing and rigging. Rich came on a bit later, and would soon call Grindle one of the best wire splicers in the business. Grindle shared with Rich the traditional mnemonic: “Worm and parcel with the lay, turn and serve the other way.”

Lobster boat style boat built for summer resident Nelson Rockefeller in 1948. It was used for family offshore fishing trips. Courtesy The Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive/Plimouth Plantation.

Grindle was also a sharp wit. Rich shared with his daughter an exchange between Grindle and a tourist gazing at the sea.

Tourist: “Look at the codfish.”

Ralph: “Yeah, the only trouble is they’ve got hake skins on ‘em.”

Rich’s disagreement with Hinckley, shortly after the end of the war, reportedly involved a 28-foot Carl Alberg-designed boat that had been built for Jim Willis, the owner of a local service operation, The Boat House. Rich didn’t like the boat’s sheer, so when a second 28-footer was commissioned, he modified the design accordingly.

Hutchins quotes Grindle’s account of the incident: “Both boats were out on their moorings, side by side, and the second boat looked so much better that Jim was teed off. So Jim went to Henry and gave him hell. Henry cut the shear down on Jim’s Hinckley and Roger got sent to the spar shop.” And then Roger said, “Let’s go build a boat in my barn,” Grindle told Hutchins.

By then, the Rich and Grindle families lived across the street from each other on Clark Point Road in Southwest Harbor. Rich had a big barn that that had been used to house horses by a previous property-owner. “When he had the opportunity to buy the place, he realized it would be a great place to build boats,” Hutchins wrote.

They hung a sign that said “Rich & Grindle Boatbuilders, General Repair Work, Wire Splicing and Rigging,” and went to work. (A third partner was Grindle’s brother Steve, a sea captain living in Florida who provided additional financial backing.)

“I do have memories of that, of being fascinated by seeing this long, metal steamer hanging from the ceiling,” says Fenton. “They would put the wood in there and leave it for hours. I think it still had the bark on the edges. When they pulled it out, it was so pliable the bark would just peel right off, and they would mold it to the boats.”

The partners’ first boat, for the Frenchboro fisherman, hit the water in 1946. In 1948, they launched three boats. There was a power yacht for William Taylor, a sportswriter from Port Washington, New York, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1934 America’s Cup, in which the United States’ Ranger defeated England’s Endeavour. They delivered a 32-foot fishing boat to summer resident Nelson Rockefeller, who planned to use if for fishing excursions by his sons, according to a local report.

“With a 9-foot beam and 32-inch draft, she is based on the offshore fishing type of hull which has become increasingly popular with summer visitors,” the report says.

Launched that same year for the Maine Sea and Shore Fisheries Commission was a new, speedy patrol boat, named the Guardian, designated to cover the coast from Stonington east. Carroll Sargent Tyson Jr. – a Northeast Harbor summer resident and artist celebrated for his depictions of the birds of MDI and Acadia National Park – commissioned a 32-foot open boat with a modern streamlined windshield casing; the boat was later sold to a lobster fisherman who, Rich told his daughter, “put a cabin on it and ruined the looks.”

Following that was a second open boat, like Tyson’s, but 25 feet long; and a lobsterboat for a Southwest Harbor fisherman who was left-handed and asked for the boat to be rigged accordingly. Just two years into operation, the yard was recognized as one of three that were vital to the Southwest Harbor community. Eleanor Newman – whose son, Jarvis Newman, was to become a popular fiberglass boatbuilder in Southwest Harbor – cited Rich & Grindle as one of the three “totally different” boatyards that comprised a “vital industry” for Southwest Harbor. These were the Henry R. Hinckley company, with a post-war payroll averaging 75 employees; the Southwest Boat Corporation, with 50; and Rich & Grindle, with just two people.

Rich & Grindle built this 32' open boat with a then modern windshield for Carroll Sargent Tyson Jr., a Northeast Harbor summer resident, in 1948. Courtesy The Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive

The partners signed another construction contract in December 1948. Talbot Hamlin was a noted New York architect, preservationist, author, and academic. He and his wife Jessica enjoyed cruising on Aquarelle, their 24-foot motor cruiser, on extended trips along the East Coast. “Odd though it seems, almost as soon as we had a boat of our own, we started thinking about another one, larger, abler, more comfortable,” they wrote in their book, We Took to Cruising, published in 1951.

Long experience on Aquarelle helped them work out the criteria for a second boat, where they hoped to live upon retirement. It had to be seaworthy, strong, and bigger than their first boat but not too big for easy handling. They preferred a trunk cabin, open cockpit with a shelter, a small rig for steadying the boat, ample locker space, and a roomy cabin. Hamlin deployed his own architectural skills to draw up sketches.

As it happened, “luck, accident, or Providence stepped in,” they wrote. Their nephew was Cyrus Hamlin, a naval architect whose designs included the well-known Hudson River sloop Clearwater. Cyrus was just opening an office in Southwest Harbor.

“Naturally, one of our sketches went to him; were we not, in fact, looking for a Down East hull?” the Hamlins wrote.

“Cy” designed a 31-foot power cruiser, to be named Aquarelle II, to be used for extended cruises. He also recommended Rich and Grindle, who were “skillful, eager for work, and economical.”

But Grindle had fallen ill and work on the boat was delayed.

Continued next month.