Harold Burnham Featured Speaker at Boatbuilders Show

Harold McKinney and John Murphy, Jr (left to right), and three unidentified students from the Malaga Island school, circa 1910. Fishermen’s Voice Photo

Among the speakers at the Maine Boat Builders Show in Portland in late March was Essex, Massachusetts wooden boat and ship builder Harold Burnham. Burnham’s talk focused on recent and past boat building projects. His work over the last couple of years has been multi-dimensional, as the owner’s representative, overseeing the restoration of the 129’ schooner Ernestina at the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, in Boothbay, ME.

Burnham travels weekly from Essex to Boothbay, where he spends two days working on the Ernestina, a ship designed and built at Gloucester, MA, near his hometown of Essex, in 1894. The Ernestina has had a long sailing life. From fishing and coasting in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to Arctic exploration and Arctic surveying for the U.S. government to later trade with the Cape Verde Islands and New Bedford, MA. The Ernestina has been designated by the U.S. Department of the Interior a National Historic Landmark as part of the New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park. It also serves as the state ship of Massachusetts. It is being restored through a joint public/private funding venture. The Earnestina is the last surviving U.S. schooner of its type and size.

Burnham showed slides and video and discussed several boat building projects at his shipyard. They included the 65’ fishing schooner Thomas E. Lannon, Maine pinkies, the Schooner Ardelle and many others. Burnham, a master shipwright, is a 2012 National Heritage Fellow. He builds wooden boats in the traditional manner, outdoors and using traditional tools, at water’s edge on the same beach where his family has built boats for nearly 400 years.