PHIPPSBURG – Three months ago, President Bush and Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Virginia’s Tidewater region to highlight the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America.

Compared to Jamestown, the Popham Colony gets short shrift in the history books and its anniversary celebration that begins this week will be a low-key affair.

But the 120 settlers who struggled through a cruel Maine winter before abandoning the site 14 months later can claim credit for something that Jamestown can’t.

“This was the first colony to build a ship – an oceangoing vessel,” said Jane Stevens, whose home is within the boundary of the colony’s Fort St. George.

Marking the Popham Colony’s 400th anniversary, there’s an effort afoot to build a reproduction of the 30-ton pinnace Virginia, a vessel that the colonists set about building within days of their arrival on the coast of what’s now Maine.

Maine’s First Ship, the nonprofit group that Stevens and a handful of volunteers founded while sitting around her kitchen table, needs at least $900,000 to begin work on the reproduction of the sturdy, square-sterned ship. The ultimate fundraising goal is $2.2 million.

Organizers hope to get some momentum from the 400th anniversary celebration that kicks off this Thursday and continues through the weekend.

It will feature concerts and re-enactments, like the Jamestown celebrations except on a much smaller scale. There also will be a parade led by Popham descendants, some of whom are flying from England, as well as a lobster bake and fireworks.

Though the Virginia wasn’t built in time for the festivities, project organizers now hope to complete the ship within the next year.

“With the splash of Jamestown, it would be appropriate to make our splash in 2008 with the 400th anniversary of the original Virginia,” said Susan McChesney, executive director of Maine’s First Ship.

The launching of the Virginia made the region the cradle of shipbuilding in America, a tradition that continues to this day.

Maine built more ships than any other part of the country through the 19th century. The square-rigged vessels that dominated the latter part of the 1800s were so synonymous with Maine that they were called Down Easters.

The shipbuilding tradition continues today on the Kennebec River, where Bath Iron Works builds $1 billion-plus guided missile destroyers for the U.S. Navy.

Maine’s First Ship has its headquarters on the grounds of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, where the reproduction of the Virginia will be built.

On a sloping lawn overlooking the Kennebec about 12 miles from the Popham site, shipbuilder Rob Stevens – no relation to Jane – is using hand tools to shape the mast, a 45-foot pine cut locally, and is working with volunteers on a spar and smaller pieces of the ship.

Others are putting together a replica of one of the colony’s “wattle and daub” houses crafted out of sticks and clay within a log frame.

On display inside the museum are some of the artifacts recovered during the 10-year archeological dig at Fort St. George, including pieces of jars, bottle glass, buttons, wooden corner posts, tobacco pipes and a caulking iron used in shipbuilding.

The excavations of the fort were led by Jeffrey Brain of the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, who used colonist John Hunt’s map of the star-shaped fort that turned up more than a century ago in Spanish archives.

It was in mid-August, 13 years before the Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Plymouth, that the colonists arrived at Popham on their two ships, the Gift of God and the Mary and John.

The exact date is uncertain, but John Bradford of Phippsburg, who has delved into the history of the settlement, said a colonist’s journal now in British archives lists Aug. 18 as the old style calendar date – Aug. 28 by today’s calendar – on which construction of the fort got under way.

The colony’s leaders, George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert, decided to build the pinnace for coastal trade and exploration to help fulfill their plan to tap what they foresaw as the riches and resources of the area.

But the settlers ran into a string of problems. Popham died, food was scarce and an unusually harsh winter took its toll.

The Virginia, about 50 feet long, became a means of escape for settlers who abandoned the site and sailed back to England in October 1608.

After making a second Atlantic crossing, to Jamestown, the ship vanished from maritime records and its fate remains a mystery.

So, too, is its design, which prompted Bradford and other researchers to visit London to comb ship records of that period to get an idea of the type of vessel that the colony’s lead shipwright, one “Digby of London,” would have built.

Once completed, the new Virginia will be docked at the Maine Maritime Museum, to serve as a floating classroom for schoolchildren and carry 35 passengers on sailing trips along the Maine coast. There also are plans to have it sail to Jamestown in 2009, duplicating the arrival there of the original Virginia four centuries earlier.