Castine’s John P. Gardner and His
Ship Models

by Sandra Dinsmore

Model of the Juliet Tilden built by John Gardner of Castine, Maine. Wilson Museum photo.

Set like freestanding sculptures in a field near the cusp of Maine’s Penobscot Bay and River, John Gardner’s house and studio looks like it loves the the ground it stands on.

An artist and ship model maker by profession, Gardner designed the studio’s lines and proportions from a composite of several early buildings that pleased his eye. A sculptor and perfectionist by nature, he treated the structure as he does his ship models: as three-dimensional art that incorporates and becomes apart of its surroundings.

The studio, a one-room building, looks like a small house with its windows and sturdy brick chimney. Gardner’s wife, Elaine, had painted the clapboards on the front a soft gold to blend with the dried field grass; nature had weathered the shingles on the sides and back to blend with the nearby glacial rocks.

John Gardner drew from the time he could hold a crayon or a pencil. He’s been drawing and carving ever since. Descended from generations of seafaring men, Gardner has lived near the water just about all his life and he’s worked on the water or on the waterfront from the time he first held a job. His father was a sea captain who shepherded Liberty ships across the Atlantic during World War II.

School didn’t really work for Gardner. He says the only thing he could manage was art and shop. Consequently, he dropped out when he was seventeen. He spent the next two years in the Navy.

After completing his two requisite years, Gardner attended New York’s Art Students League on the GI Bill for a year and a half, studying drawing and painting.

After an abortive attempt to sail around the world as crew on a vessel that apparently never should have left New York Harbor, Gardner worked as a deckhand on tugboats in New York, the Erie Canal, and Detroit. After a year, he went back to the New York waterfront where he worked as a pier superintendent. “I don’t think I could have been successful at any other job,” Gardner said. “I found my niche. I loved it much more than going to sea.”

Gardner’s success as a pier superintendent was partly because of the way he got his men to work for him. He described one example of how he turned a problem into an asset. One particular longshoreman caused trouble and constantly complained. “He was like a locomotive in the hold. I had to do something, so I wondered if giving him more responsibility would help.” Gardner said he called the man aside one day and — lightning should have struck him — told him he had a way with the men and would he like to be a hatch boss. The longshoreman muttered that he didn’t think Gardner had ever noticed him, said he’d give it a try, and from then on, Gardner never had a moment’s trouble with him. “He turned out to be one of my best hatch bosses,” the pier superintendent recalled. “He was a hard worker, and big enough to be physically intimidating to the other men; you want a little of that on the waterfront.

“Those were good years,” he said. “I made a lot of friends.” One of those friends was Joe Mickey, the head pier superintendent at the Brooklyn Breakwater.

When asked to describe Gardner during their years on the waterfront, Mickey noted Gardner’s “easy rapport with the longshoremen and his inexhaustible energy.” He then explained, “On the waterfront, you have to be tested before you are accepted. John passed, and his acceptance was instant and positive.”

On the other hand, Mickey, who died in the late 1990s, mentioned what he referred to as Gardner’s shortcomings in mathematics, citing problems he had with the reports he had to make on the loading or discharging of ships. To help him, Mickey appropriated an old adding machine from the accounting storeroom that he claimed must have weighted fifty-five pounds, in those days before pocket calculators. He said Gardner lugged that woolly mammoth around with him, and it solved the problem. As to Gardner’s personality, Mickey astutely remarked, “John remained a boy a little longer than most young adults.”

During his years on the waterfront Gardner never took a bribe and never got involved with the mob because of the positive lessons he learned from his father. When a union boss sent his father a television set for Christmas, Captain Gardner sent it back. So when his son, as a young pier superintendent, was offered his first bribe, money in an envelope from an Argentinean captain who was doing something illegal, he didn’t even look at it. “There’s a lot you don’t want to know about the waterfront,” Gardner recalled. “There’s a side to the waterfront you don’t talk about. It’s there and it’s left unsaid because it’s not your business, and you don’t want to be the one to make it the world’s business either.”

After working on the New York waterfront, he was transferred to Detroit, which simply did not work for Gardner. He quickly moved back to what he considered professional longshoremen in New York, where he met and fell in love with the beautiful Elaine Caretto.

Transferred from the Brooklyn Breakwater to Bayonne, New Jersey, Gardner was so in love with Elaine, he even moved to what he called a fleabag hotel on Long Island, just to be closer to her. Because his driver’s license had been revoked for speeding, he had to catch a train at three in the morning in order to reach his pier superintendent’s job in time for work. He used the hours sitting on the commuter train to carve ship models. Traveling with balsa wood and razor blades, he’d carve one hull per trip. So between carving while commuting and sketching during his lunch hour, he continued to practice his art.

Gardner married Elaine in 1967. Two years later their daughter Julianne was born. That year he and Elaine bought a 26-foot O’Day Outlaw sloop, which he learned to sail and to race. He raced the sloop, renamed JULIE, for the next 15 years.

In 1974, Gardner became curator of a maritime museum at Maine Maritime Academy, in Castine, the Allie Ryan Museum, where he also carved ship models. Although he had begun serious study of ship model-making back in the 1960s with a view toward becoming a professional, Gardner did not make his first sale until later in 1974, when he sold the eight steamboat models to the Marine Arts Gallery, in Salem, Massachusetts. He then made a model of the schooner MATTIE, alternately named GRACE BAILEY.

He sold the MATTIE in 1986. When she was about to be renovated, because the detail of Gardner’s model is so accurate, MATTIE’s captain, Ted Schmidt, came to Castine to see the model and based his renovations on Gardner’s work.

While at the Allie Ryan Museum, Gardner also made a waterline model of another type of old schooner: an imaginary pinky he named ROMP. The pinky schooner, a type of fishing vessel, flourished from the 1820s—with its heyday in the 1840s—to the 1880s when it faded away as newer types evolved. Easily recognizable, its distinctive high, narrow, pointed stern protected fishermen from getting “pooped.” (When running before the wind: wind coming from behind the vessel, heavy seas can break over the stern and deluge or sweep overboard any fishermen working aft.)

ROMP was the first of three pinkies Gardner made. He loves to depict old schooners, and Maine pinkies, in particular, seem to unleash his imagination.

The late poet Philip Booth bought the model with what he called its cod head and mackerel tail. He said he saw ROMP in process at the museum, liked its character, and thought it seemed right for his family-descended Greek revival house of the same period. He said he paid for the model with part of the advance on his book, Available Light.

Describing Gardner’s loyalty to his work, Booth observed, “Very much, his loyalty to a model is in getting things right in the same way that the original builder would try to get it right for the same reasons: that the model be as weatherly as the full-scale vessel—if the wind came up in the showcase.”

Gardner continued making ship models and taking people sailing until 1979, when he went back to sea as a deckhand on the ALASKAN SEAHORSE, a 200-foot offshore-supply tug for the oil rigs in the Hudson Canyon of the Atlantic Ocean, 150 miles off the coast of New York. That autumn, with steady money coming in from his work on the SEAHORSE, he designed an art studio. In 1977, he and Elaine had bought twelve acres on the outer edges of Castine—six acres of woods and six more of cleared blueberry fields.

A fall from vessel to dock in 1981, in which he fractured two vertebrae in his neck, ended Gardner’s seagoing career. It took about a year for the nerves to heal and the numbness to leave his body, leaving only a residual, painful arthritic neck to remind him of his brush with paralysis.

During that year of recovery, the Gardners’ income hit an all-time low. Because John couldn’t work, Elaine worked part-time at several jobs and John, when he could, worked on a model of a pinky schooner of his own design, which he named ANNIE, for his five-year-old younger daughter.

“I took the lines of it from other pinkies,” John said. “It’s kind of my own boat. If I were living in the 1840s and wanted to build a pinky, it would be that boat.”

Model of the Grace Bailey built by John Gardner of Castine, Maine. Wilson Museum photo.

After completing ANNIE, Gardner’s work picked up. During the next couple of years he completed several models and a Finnish-built, Palmer-Johnson sloop, BLACK MALLARD II. Lansdell McRoberts, son of the owner of BLACK MALLARD II, helped Gardner carry the heavy plate glass–cased model. He had worked for three summers on BLACK MALLARD II. After the model was set up, McRoberts said he sat and studied the model for three hours. He found only two inaccuracies: Gardner had included a line that had been left in place after routine maintenance and he had tied the man-overboard pole differently on the starboard side. “It astounded me,” McRoberts said. “It was the most perplexing thing: I didn’t think anybody could be that accurate. It was like capturing a piece of my life.”

Gardner, told of McRoberts’s reaction, admitted, “I knew I caught the spirit of the boat.” He also caught the spirit of nine models of Castine-class sloops he built between 1982 to 1985, bringing out the distinctiveness of each vessel and setting each model differently, including the four versions of HOPPIE he created for David, Henry, Ed Jr., and Helen Miller.

David Bicks of Castine, has a Gardner model of his Castine-class sailboat, CAROLINE B. He explained what makes him feel so strongly about his model. “Two things, One: the absolute faithful detail, down to the sloppy tape on the turnbuckles. Two: the way the thing is set. John set the boat on the ways, and if you look at the model and just focus in the case, you have no feeling that you’re not looking at the real thing.”

Getting commissions and selling models has been for Gardner mostly a matter of word-of-mouth or seeing a model in progress. Always insecure, he said he was surprised that he got the commission for SWAN V. The owner responded to an advertisement Gardner ran in WoodenBoat magazine that included a photograph of his model of RANGER. Of the commission, Gardner said, “I was amazed that anybody would want to take a chance like that on my work. I felt inadequate.” He still does. When I mentioned the success of his model of RANGER, the perfectionist in him replied. “The RANGER never looked good to me until I saw it years later. I see things about it that I would change.”

Because he had not seen the plans or the vessel, Gardner flew to Antibes, where he spent twelve days living aboard the yacht, getting a sense of the vessel and taking measurements and photographs. When he returned, Bicks said he asked him what he thought of the boat, “knowing what his reaction was going to be because it’s essentially a plywood Italian speedboat.” He said Gardner told him, ‘The best thing about it is that it has smoked windows, so I don’t have to build the goddamn furniture.’

A fishing friend, Nathan Cooper, said, “It’s amazing that he can do that intricate work because as a carpenter, he can’t drive a nail in a board. I don’t know how he does it, because he’s half blind. He wears glasses, but he has these magnifiers.

“He’s behind that bench all day long. That’s got to be mind-bending—getting every little plank—but he sells the Castine-class models for more than the sailboats cost originally.

“When he makes those models, he knows the right kind of block that you’re supposed to use for this rig and that rig. He makes the wooden block and he rigs it so it would actually work; and that, alone, is like an art, all by itself: rigging the block. He looks at the boat and takes pictures, and if there’s a little bit of rust on the boat, he puts it on the model. He builds his models the way you’d build a boat. A lot of people just get little skinny plywood, or whatever, but he makes ribs.”

Cooper then astutely observed, “He has to have a deadline on the models. When he’s up against a wall and working all night, that’s when he does his best work.”

“You know, it’s funny,” he mused, “but as I think about it, I get a visual image of the time and surroundings, and, boom! I’m there.”