Under sail in 1990. Photo courtesy Apalachicola Maritime Institute, Inc., Kristin Anderson, photographer.
NOTES
1. See Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878) as well as later editions of the same, such as 1923.
2. The characteristics of Biloxi
and other Gulf-built schooners are discussed in Howard I. Chapelle,
The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, D.C.: The
National Museum of American History, 1960), pp. 234-235.
Statement of Significance
The most common American vessel type was the two-masted coasting
schooner. Developed in the mid-to-late 18th century, these vessels
reached a more or less standard form by the mid-19th century,
a design that continued to be built into the first decades of
the 20th century. The only variation of note in the two-masted
schooner, aside from the underwater form of the hull, or the lines,
was the presence of a centerboard. Tens of thousands of these
vessels were built and operated on the Pacific, Atlantic, and
Gulf coasts, and on the Great Lakes in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. The "freight trucks" of their time, the coasting
schooners carried coal, bricks, iron ore, grain, oysters, and
numerous other bulk products between ports.
There are now only five surviving two-masted coasting schooners
in the United States--Lewis R. French (1871); Stephen
Taber (1871); Governor Stone (1877); Grace Bailey
(1882); and Mercantile (1916); all subjects of separate
studies. Of all of these vessels, Governor Stone is the
only surviving Gulf-built schooner of thousands constructed and
employed in the busy and nationally important Gulf fishing and
general freight trades. Governor Stone is the sole known
survivor afloat of the indigenous sailing schooners of the American
South. After more than a century in service, including time as
an auxiliary-powered oyster buyboat, Governor Stone was
restored and placed in operation as a museum-operated historic
vessel, carrying passengers on charters and sail training cruises
along the Gulf coast.
The preceding statement of significance is based on the more
detailed statements that follow.
THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPORTANCE OF THE TWO-MASTED COASTING SCHOONER
The use of two-masted schooners for "coasting," i.e.,
the transport of cargo from one Atlantic coast port to another
from the early 19th century to around the outbreak of World War
II was one "so common that nobody paid much attention to
them."[1] Designed to run close to shore, the coaster lacked
the fishing schooner's ability to ride out a gale offshore on
the fishing grounds. The coaster never approached the scale of
the great four-, five-, or six-masted coal schooners which arose
late in the 19th century to transport coal from southern to northern
ports. Deepwater sailors, who occasionally took a large schooner
across the Atlantic, scorned the useful and ubiquitous little
coasters, sometimes accusing their skippers of "setting their
course by the bark of a dog."[2]
One of the earliest depictions of a schooner is shown in an engraving
by the Dutch artist, Van de Velde, who died in 1707, depicting
a two-masted vessel with a gaff-rigged sail on each mast. By 1780,
Falconer's Universal Dictionary of the Marine defined a
schooner as "a small vessel with two masts, whose mainsail
and foresail are suspended from gaffs reaching out below
by booms, whose foremost ends are hooked to an iron, which clasps
the mast so as to turn therein as upon an axis, when the after-
ends are swung from one side of the vessel to the other."[3]
The origin of the term "schooner" is itself obscure.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary assigns it an origin of
about 1716 and Websters calls it of "origin unknown."[4]
It has been noted that in Scotland, "to schoon" is to
skim along the water.[5] There is a persistent bit of American
folklore which attributes the word's origin to Marblehead, Massachusetts,
about 1721, but later scholarship has thrown significant doubt
on this theory.[6]
"Coasters, in the United States," according to maritime
historian Howard I. Chapelle, "have been schooners since
1800, if not earlier. The early coasting trade was carried out
in vessels of all types...but the schooner gradually monopolized
the trade."[7] It is said that "the straight fore-and-aft-rigged
schooner is decidedly a coastwise vessel, and attempts to use
such craft for long voyages have invariably been disappointing
and disillusion- ing, if not disastrous to the adventurers."[8]
However, coasters occasionally ventured as far as the Caribbean,
the American schooner Success being reported in Jamaica,
bound for Santo Domingo, in 1801.[9] Other surviving accounts
from the 19th century indicate a considerable Caribbean trade.[10]
The schooner supplanted the squareriggers in the coasting trade
for practical reasons:
The fore-and-aft rig came to be preferred
for coasting vessels for several reasons. Fewer sailors were
re quired to handle the vessel, and a schooner could be worked
into and out of harbors and rivers more easily than any square-rigged
craft. Her trips could also, as a rule, be made in quicker time,
as she could sail closer into the wind, and it was hardly necessary
for her to sail from Maine to New York by way of the Ber mudas,
as some square-rigged vessels have done during baffling winds.[11]
Another student of schooners commented
that
Such vessels were handy, economical
and easily built of readily accessible materials, perfectly suited
to their task, and their number was legion. They were the errand
boys, the short-haul freight droghers, and the passenger buses
for many a year, and their contribution to coastal community
life, especially in New England, was substantial.[12]
These unromantic little vessels, described
by a man who spent his youth in them as "no more than seagoing
tipcarts, hauling their prosaic cargoes from one coastal port
to another" were nonetheless important. "Without them
the country could hardly have been settled.[13] They were the
pickup trucks of coasts in an era before the advent of good, all-weather
highways made land transportation practical year-round, and ubiquitous
for several generations.
CONSTRUCTION AND CAREER OF GOVERNOR STONE
The schooner Governor Stone was built at Pascagoula, Mississippi,
for merchant Charles Anthorn Greiner. Built in 1877 and probably
launched in November of that year, the schooner was named for
John Marshall Stone, the first Governor of Mississippi elected
after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Greiner's close friend.
Governor Stone was built for Greiner to haul materials
from his ship chandlery and sawmill in Pascagoula out to deepwater
sailing ships anchored off the mouth of the shallow Singing River.[14]
Until harbor improvements and dredging projects in the late 19th
century improved conditions, schooners like Governor Stone
formed an important part of the maritime commerce of the South
and the Gulf coast, particularly the Upper Gulf Coast, where shallows
and sandbars made the employment of shoal centerboard schooners
essential for the transfer of freight and goods to and from large,
oceangoing sailing vessels that could not come into port. After
the period of harbor improvements, the Upper Gulf coasting schooners
were adapted to fishing and oystering, and their form and lines
inspired the next generation of fishing schooners, many of which
were built in Biloxi, and thus are known as "Biloxi schooners."[15]
Greiner sold Governor Stone to Mulford Dorlon of Dauphin
Island, Alabama, in 1880. Dorlon used the schooner to carry freight
and, as a buyboat, to purchase oysters from tongers. In 1882,
he sold a half-interest in the schooner to Patrick Henry Burns,
who operated Stone after Dorlon's death in 1895. In 1906,
Dorlon's heirs sold their interest to Burns, who operated the
schooner with his son Thomas. In July 1922, the elder Burns transferred
Governor Stone to his son, who continued to work her as
an oyster buyboat until 1939, when the schooner sank at Bay St.
Louis, Mississippi. During this period, Governor Stone
and Thomas Burns both survived a hurricane on September 26, 1906,
that caught a fleet of several schooners on Herron Bay, Alabama.
Stone capsized and Burns was washed ashore clinging to
a skiff, the sole survivor of the 22 men serving aboard the lost
schooners. Stranded 300 yards inland in a marsh, Governor Stone
was rolled back into the water on pine log rollers with $600 damage.
Repaired and put back into service, she continued to work, carrying
oysters from South Mobile Bay to market in Mobile. Burns also
used the schooner as a "rum runner" during Prohibition,
carrying whiskey offloaded at sea from ships that had brought
the liquor from Cuba. Making two trips per month, Burns made $500
on each run.[16]
The sunk and derelict Governor Stone was raised and repaired
in late 1939 by Isaac T. Rhea at DeLisle, Mississippi. Rhea renamed
the schooner Queen of the Fleet in 1940, and used her for
the next two years as a daysailer for his guests at Inn By The
Sea, a summer resort he owned near Pass Christian, Mississippi.
In 1942, the schooner was leased to the War Shipping Board for
use as a Merchant Marine Academy sail training vessel based in
Biloxi. Rhea reclaimed the vessel in 1947, and his estate sold
her in 1953 to Charles B. Merrick of Pass Christian. The schooner
then passed through five owners, each of whom changed her name,
respectively, The Pirate Queen (1956-1957); Sea Bob
(1957-1963); C'est la Vie (1963-1965); and Sovereign
(1965-1967). The last owner, John Curry, conducted research that
identified the vessel as Governor Stone, and began a program
of restoration that lasted through the 1970s and 1980s.[17]
Mr. Curry negotiated a deal to complete Governor Stone's
restoration and display her at Pascagoula, where she was built.
This effort failed, and after two years, the schooner was deeded
to the current owner, the Apalachicola Maritime Institute, Inc.
Apalachicola, once a thriving port and center of southern ship-
building, was in the midst of a historic preservation boom in
1989. The schooner was restored between September 1989 and June
1990 and brought to Apalachicola to serve as a sail training vessel
and sailing goodwill ambassador.
NOTES
1. Nicholas Dean, interview with
Capt. W.J. Lewis Parker, Camden, Maine, May 1990.
2. Polly Burroughs, Zeb: A Celebrated Schooner Life (Riverside, Connecticut: The Chatham Press, 1972) p. 33.
3. E.P. Morris, The Fore-and-Aft Rig in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927) p. 178, and William Falconer, A Universal Dictionary of the Marine (London: T. Cadell, 1780), p. 257.
4. The Oxford Universal Dictionary (Oxford: The Oxford University Press, Third
edition revised, 1955) p. 1806, and Webster's Third New International
Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam, 1981) p. 2031.
5. Eric Partridge, Origins
(New York: Greenwich House, 1983) p. 594.
6. Morris, op.cit, p. 174ff.
7. Howard I. Chapelle, The
National Watercraft Collection (Washington, D.C.: United States
National Museum, Government Printing Office, 1960) p. 258.
8. William A. Fairburn, Merchant Sail (Center Lovell, Maine: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, Inc., 1944-1955) vol. IV, p. 2608.
9. Charles S. Morgan, "New
England Coasting Schooners," in E.W. Smith, ed. Workaday
Schooners (Camden, Maine: International Marine Publishing,
1975) p. 158.
10. Ralph H. Griffen, Jr. ed.
Letters of a New England Coaster, 1868-1872 (Published
by the author, n.d.) passim.
11. Henry Hall, Report on the
Shipbuilding Industry of the United States (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1882) p. 93.
12. Morgan, op.cit, p. 156.
13. John F. Leavitt, Wake of
the Coasters (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University
Press, 1970), p. 17.
14. Apalachicola Maritime Institute,
"History of the Sailing Vessel Governor Stone,"
(September 1990), passim. Additionally, John C. Curry provided
a notebook with copies of his research correspondence, the vessel's
various enrollments and licenses, and interviews with former owners
and descendants.
15. Ibid. Also see Howard
I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington,
D.C.: The National Museum of American History, 1960), pp. 234-236.
16. Ibid.
17 Ibid.
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