Tiny Shop Part of Boating History : It’s Been Doing Handcrafted Work Since the 1790s

George Washington was beginning his second term as President when Simeon Lowell opened his boat shop on the north banks of the Merrimack River, six miles downstream from the Atlantic Ocean in this small New England town by the New Hampshire border.

Lowell’s Boat Shop, 195 years later, is in the same building, producing small craft without interruption all these years, the oldest boat shop in America.

“This is the birthplace of the dory, the sturdy, flat bottom, high-sided, seaworthy boat Simmie Lowell invented and started handcrafting in 1793. And, we’re still building dories here today,” said Malcolm (Jim) Odell, 75, first owner not to be a Lowell.

$200,000 Gross Sales

The old boat works is filled with antique tools, worn benches, crooked floors, four-inch-deep paint drippings and carved records on its beams including “1911--2,029 boats” the peak production year.

Of the more than 250,000 boats turned out here, most have been dories, used as fishing boats by fleets of many nations. In the 1950s, scores of Lowell’s dories were sold to Southern California lifeguard units to be used as lifeboats for rescuing bathers. They are still in use today.

The biggest share of dories manufactured at Lowell’s boat shop were used from 1875 to World War I by fishermen on the Georges and Grand Banks in the North Atlantic.

“Fishing schooners in those years carried a dozen to 20 dories on open decks. It was discovered by lowering crews from the schooners into dories instead of lining rails with fishermen the catch doubled and tripled,” Odell explained. “Those were the best of times for Lowell’s Boat Shop.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, the advent of fiberglass boats almost blew Lowell’s Boat Shop out of the water. Sales plummeted. Ralph Lowell, seventh-generation owner of the historic firm, hung on until 1976, when he sold the company to Odell--a retired box company executive with a lifelong passion for wooden boats.

“Gross sales were $16,000 for the previous year when I took over 11 years ago,” said Odell. “It has been steady growth ever since. Last year’s gross sales were nearly $200,000.

“But it’s a just-break-even business. It’s not a business to make money. It’s a hell of a good thing for a guy like myself who is nuts about wooden boats and is doing it for the love of it.”

Lowell’s Boat Shop turned out 30 small boats last year.

There are five boat builders in the shop, all college graduates: Jim Odell, who went to the Naval Academy; his son, George, 37; Wendy Vosburgh, 42; Bill Nichols, 30, and Peter Gibb, 34. “Every one of them could be making considerably more money working somewhere else but, like me, they’re here because of the history and nostalgia of this place,” said Jim Odell.

Pipe-smoking Fred Tarbox, 73, who spent most of his life building boats at Lowell’s, shared all his secrets and taught the craft to the five boat builders now at the shop. “Fred keeps us from getting into trouble,” allowed Odell. “He drops by and helps out several hours a week in his semi-retirement role as consultant.”

Simeon Lowell was a member of the famous Boston family after whom Lowell, Mass., is named, a family that includes poets Amy and James Russell Lowell. He began to build dories in 1793 next to the then-century-old Lowell shipyards in Amesbury.

The shipyard built Atlantic schooners that carried passengers and freight between the Colonies and Europe.

“He designed a boat of simple construction with extra buoyancy and stability able to go across the treacherous bars head-on at the mouth of the Merrimack River without being swamped,” explained Odell. “Ancestors of Simmie Lowell’s dory go back to Scandinavian longboats, French and Portuguese flat bottom boats.”

The Coast Guard and Navy have been buying Lowell dories for more than a century. Boy Scouts have been using Lowell rowboats since the 1920s. Today the old-fashioned boat works produces hand-shaped small craft from seven-foot dingies to 21-foot-high capacity dories, skiffs, pleasure, fishing, rowing, sailing and power wooden boats that sell for $1,000 to $20,000 each.

Antique Revived

“The boats of oak-sawn frames, pine lapstake planking with high prows are long lasting,” said boat builder Vosburgh as she applied paint to a 16-foot skiff. She told of a 104-year-old Lowell dory brought into the shop recently for repairs.

A farmer in Rowley, Mass., used the boat to fish and row on a pond. He asked if it could be put back in good condition. “I removed 14 coats of paint from the old dory,” Vosburgh said. “We replaced an oak piece on the stern, installed a couple of new seats and sold the owner a new pair of oars. Now it’s as good as new.”

Old photos lining Odell’s office walls include a blowup of a load of dories being hauled from the boat works on a wagon pulled by a team of horses headed for Gloucester Bay.

Lowell’s Boat Shop is not only the oldest boat works in America, it’s one of the oldest companies in continuous operation since the birth of the nation.