We have visited the Maine Maritime Museum several times to do research for our children's guide to the Museum. Here are some of our first draft accounts of a few of the areas visited.

Hi! I want to tell you about the Mill and Joiner Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum. It has a lot of tools like the broadaxe, adze, pit saw, and timber dogs. Oh yeah, and the treenail drill. But that's not all they have in there. They have a piece of a ship that got caught in a big storm. All of the pieces went off onto a beach and the Maine Maritime Museum took a piece and put it in the Mill and Joiner Shop. On the ship there were only three layers of wood between the people and the sea.

Some groups of people called the joiners got $3.75 and the rest of the workers got $1.00 for one whole day. The joiners were the smartest of them all.

Emily

At the museum, Mark tells us the story of the shipbuilders of the Percy and Small Shipyard.

Now let's go to the caulking shed. All you have to do is turn right and go into the building in front of you. On the floor are coils of old ropes. That is where they get the oakum. In the corner there is a bail of oakum in case you want to see what it looks like.

Rachel

Then they would put pitch in the oakum and roll it up and down their thigh. They took the oakum and hammered it into the cracks that were on the outside of the ship, or maybe even a schooner. I don't know how it did not hurt to put boiling hot oakum on your very own thighs. That was your reading tour of a pitch oven.

Danny

The Sherman Zwicker is the biggest ship in the water at the Maine Maritime Museum. It is a fishing ship that caught codfish. There were 28 men on the ship.

Every morning 24 of those men would go out in dories and have lines in their hands and sit there and catch fish. They would come back at the end of the day and throw the fish on the deck and clean them. Then they would throw them down a hole and a man would salt the fish and then put them in piles and store them.

The ship was made in 1942 and was 142 feet long and could carry 320,000 pounds of fish.

Tom

We are learning a lot about the Museum and plan to add to this page soon.