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boat of legend, the first built at Chebacco by European settlers,
and this Mr. Burnham gave rise to decades, and then centuries of
shipbuilding. Chebacco Parish became Essex – a town in her
own right – during this time, and thousands more vessels were
launched into the salt marsh there, a body of water known as the
Essex River. The yards where these schooners were built were often
not much larger than the vessels themselves.
The place was rife with Burnhams. Like
many small towns years ago, there was a paucity of surnames in
Essex; most people were called either Story, Andrews, or Burnham.
Despite common ancestry, relationships among people today possessing
the same last name are considered so tenuous, so obscure, as to
be nonexistent. "I only know back to my great-great grandfather,
Oliver Burnham," Harold Burnham told me last February, when
I finally caught him between boatbuilding projects. We were sitting
in his shop, which occupies the loft of a barn that looks across
a small creek near the sit where the LANNON was built. Harold
was relaxed that day, and as intent on our conversation as he
had been on building a schooner the year before. "He built
this barn. His son, also Oliver Burnham, build boats in the 1860s.
This Oliver’s son was O.P., and O.P. worked for A.D. Story
building fo’c’s’les and doing carpentry. His brother
Alden worked for A.D. as a foreman. And my grandfather worked
for A.D. Story as a kid in the 1920s." In the index of Howard
Chapelle’s The American Fishing Schooners: 1825 – 1935,
12 Burnhams are listed. All of them were shipbuilders.
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"When
my grandfather was getting started in boatbuilding, the unions were
getting started, too. He gave up boatbuilding to go to work as a
union carpenter in Quincy, which was a pretty radical thing to do.
Alden Burnham, who was his uncle, bet him five dollars that he’d
be back building boats in a few weeks. My grandfather didn’t
come back for 40 years, and Alden never paid the bet."
So the family drifted from boatbuilding – professionally at
least. But it seems to have remained in the genes. "My father
worked at Massachusetts General [Hospital] designing machines that
take pictures of people’s brains," Harold told me, "and
that’s about as accurate a description as I can give you of
his job. But when he wasn’t in Boston working, he was home
building boats." This boatbuilding, however, was far from the
typical hobby. His attitude, says Harold, was "Let’s get
it done." And indeed he did, for one year Harold’s father
built a Friendship sloop in nine months of part-time labor –
he worked weekends and evenings, after 12 hours on the day job.
"When I was growing up," laughed Harold, "if I wanted
to be with my father – if I wanted to see him at all –
I had to go over and build boats with him."
Harold started building small boats when he was in grammar school,
and made his college money re-building Beetle cats and selling those.
He attended Massachusetts Maritime Academy, got his merchant
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