Spring Bus Trip to Essex, MA: Shipbuilding and River Ride
Saturday, May 8, 2010
8 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Travel just north of Boston to visit the fascinating Essex Historical Society and Shipbuilding Museum. Learn the extraordinary story of how a small New England village built more two-masted wooden fishing schooners than any other place in the world, including our own L.A. Dunton. Watch the 1947 film on The Shipbuilders of Essex that depicts local shipbuilders in action framing up, steambending, planking, caulking and pounding trunnels. Make your own trunnels and pound some real oakum to caulk a ship. Practice the art of steambending a plank onto the ships' ribs. Tour antique shipbuilding tools, photographs and exhibits housed in the original Essex Central School house and visit one of the five surviving Essex-built fishing schooners, the Evelina M. Goulart.
Enjoy a delicious lunch across the street at the Periwinkle Restaurant, "where all the locals go," and complete the visit on a relaxing 1½-hour river cruise on the sheltered, meandering waters of the Essex River -- a salt marsh estuary formed 15,000 years ago by melting glaciers of the last Ice Age. It now serves as feeding grounds for many species of beautiful birds and abundant wildlife and sustains boatbuilders, fishermen, clammers and characters of all sorts. You will hear all the stories on the narrated cruise!
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Interested in The Shipbuilders of Essex? Buy the book The Shipbuilders of Essex: A Chronicle of Yankee Endeavor by Dana A. Story available in our Museum Store.