Intensive shipping activity once filled the St. Croix River at Calais

CALAIS — Only the rotted wharfs recall this city’s heyday as a lumber port.

There was a time in the late 19th century when sailing ships swarmed on the St. Croix River. White sails dotted the river as vessels came and went with the prevailing tides. Black smoke swirled skyward whenever steamers appeared in the river, particularly at St. Andrews.

Located at the head of tide, Calais and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, shipped lumber worldwide. Local shipyards buzzed with new construction and remodeling. Local history indicates that the first vessel launched upriver from St. Andrews rolled down its St. Stephen ways in 1797, destined for a Saint John customer.

Times have changed. There are no shipyards in Calais or St. Stephen, and according to the Nov. 9, 1922 issue of the Bangor Daily News, the era of Calais-owned vessels ended that autumn.

Ship construction became a Calais-based industry in 1803, when Jarius Keene built the schooner Liberty at Kilburn Point. Another schooner, the Boyne, was soon built for Shubel Downes, a Calais-area shipmaster, and shipbuilding took off along the St. Croix. According to Brand Livingston of the Calais Historical Society, Downes “was an early resident of Calais. He ran a tavern, and he and other men were all in the woods business, buying and selling land. There’s a street, Downes Street in Calais, named after him.”

Ships bearing names like Boston, Calais Packet, Cleopatra, and Heroine were launched at Calais yards after the War of 1812. Precursor to the Depression 110 years later, a national panic shattered the United States’ economic confidence in 1823, idling the Calais yards for a few years. “Several half-built vessels in St. Stephen were abandoned and left to rot on the stocks,” a press account reported.

The “good times” returned in 1825. A year later, Canadian resident O.P. Hinds “took down two of the rotting hulks” and, as would a master mechanic rebuilding a vintage automobile, “worked over a part of their material into the two new brigs, Mary Porter and Pilgrim.”

Similar construction bolstered the numbers of the growing Calais-registered fleet. Locally built vessels were better-designed to cope with the vagaries of the St. Croix; as the NEWS reported, “the tide rises and falls 26 feet, making the river navigable for large vessels, twice in every 24 hours.

“At low water, however, the rivers appears like a shallow stream running through a wide and deep valley,” the paper stated. “The bed of the river, made soft by vast accumulations of mud and sawdust, permits vessels of any size to ground without injury.”

Recalling the heyday of St. Croix shipping activity, a Calais sea captain remembered “when there was (sic) 90 to 100 vessels all owned by local Calais parties. At that time…there were numerous wharves piled high with lumber and scores of able-bodied men busily engaged loading the craft. Things along the waterfront 25 years ago were certainly humming.”

Even as the sea captain spoke with the NEWS reporter that November, river-focused life was changing. The reporter had noted an important local milestone: the schooner Freddie Eaton, the last sailing vessel owned and registered in Calais, had recently been sold to a Nova Scotian sailor. “The decline of the lumber industry here is responsible for the end of locally owned sailing vessels,” the reporter wrote.