150 Years of Oar & Paddle Making

150 Years of Oar

and Paddle Making Craft and craftsmanship at the venerable Orono firm of Shaw & Tenney.

BY LETITIA BALDWIN

R

all images courtesy Shaw & Tenney

ALPH W. STANLEY, Maine’s boatbuilder laureate, slipped into a small rowboat, slid worn oars into the locks, and shoved off from his boatshop dock between working wharves on the eastern shore of Southwest Harbor. He rowed past Seven Girls, his lobsterboat, the Friendship sloop Endeavor, and several other wooden boats he has built over more than half a century. One of his projects has been the revival of a round-

Above: Stitching a custom-fitted oar leather by hand. The worker uses fingerless gloves to protect his hands. Inset: All genuine Shaw & Tenney oars and paddles are literally branded Opposite page: The old days, top to bottom: Sawing out blanks from live-edge boards; rough-sawing oar blanks on a bandsaw; turning a shaft on a lathe; shaping an oar on a drum sander.

42

bottom skiff designed and built by Islesford boatbuilder Capt. Arthur “Chummy” Spurling during the 1940s.

“Years ago, people used to row for the fun of it,” the 79-year-old Stanley said. “The ladies with their big hats would sit in the stern.”

Stanley’s shop has produced six Spurling skiffs and seven flat-bottomed rowboats. Nearly all were equipped with a pair of new oars made by Shaw & Tenney of Orono. The skiffs and the oars share the same high standard of design and workmanship; both have roots in the nineteenth century, when they were heavily used for all manner of activity on the water.

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

WINTER 2009

|

Issue 102

Stanley has great respect for Shaw & Tenney oars.

“They go into the water good,” he said, “and they go out of the water good.” He had bought the spruce oars he was using from Shaw & Tenney 15 years previously; over time he has had to repair a split or two and deal with chafing where the shafts bear against the oarlocks, but the oars remain fundamentally good. “They last forever,” he said.

Since 1858, Shaw & Tenney, a small Maine company, has made solid wooden oars and paddles in various locations near the Stillwater River, a tributary on the western “chute” of the Penobscot River in Orono.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Maine rivers and coastal waters served as the state’s highway network for transporting people and goods. Like axes and brooms, oars were utilitarian tools much in demand by all sorts of daily users, from the U.S. Life-Saving Service, which used them to power its surfboats, to Grand Banks fishermen, who used them in the dories they launched from the decks of schooners.

A century and a half after its founding, Shaw & Tenney is the oldest continuing and top producer of solid wooden oars and paddles in America. Using primarily spruce and ash, the company makes both flat- and spoonbladed oars of every imaginable type, among them long sweeps used by Las Vegas gondoliers to propel tourists down the city’s reproduction of Venice’s Grand Canal, oars for the Royal Saudi Naval Force’s whale boats, and sculls for Merrymeeting Bay duck hunters, who work their boats from a prone position.

Besides oars, S&T turns out a great variety of canoe and kayak paddles of spruce, ash, and soft maple, and such specialty woods as sassafras and curly maple. The paddles vary in style and usage, from the classic Penobscot-pattern single-bladed canoe paddle, to the double-bladed paddle developed by yacht designer L. Francis Herreshoff, to the narrow, energy-efficient style similar to those used for centuries by the Inuit to paddle sea kayaks around Greenland and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, to the laser-engraved commemorative paddles created for diverse organizations, such as the U.S. Marine Corps’s Reconnaissance Force.

In recent years, Shaw & Tenney’s latest owners, Steve Holt and Nancy Forster-Holt, have broadened the product line to include custom wooden masts, spars, yardarms, boat hooks, flagpoles, and pack baskets, and have staked out a rapidly growing niche in those markets. Their tallest flagpole to date, a 50-footer, was recently erected on Hog Island off Deer Isle and quickly became a daymark for sailors cruising East Penobscot Bay. Like its durable oars, Shaw & Tenney aims to be around for a long time; it has set a bold course for the future. To mark its 150th anniversary, the small Maine company launched plans to emphasize its tradition of craftsmanship and design by offering its own wooden rowing boat inspired by the classic Whitehalls at Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. As prized as S&T’s oars, Whitehalls are known for their speed, seaworthiness, and www.maineboats.com

|

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

43

Shaw & Tenney is the oldest

producer of wooden oars and elegant lines. The company’s version will be rigged for sail, will have a sliding seat for rowing, and is expected to weigh 125 to 135 pounds; two people will be able to load it on a car’s roof for transport.

“It is going to be a modern reproduction of an historic and traditional Whitehall,” Steve Holt said. “We want to offer a traditional wooden Whitehall with exceptional performance.”

LOCATED AT NUMBER 20 Water Street, Orono, in a quiet residential neighborhood otherwise dominated by the University of

Shaw & Tenney’s shop in the olden days.

Maine campus, the Shaw & Tenney workshop, a mustard-yellow clapboard building and adjoining barn, looks deceptively small from the outside. The sound of buzzing saws within could cause a passerby to mistake it for a woodworking hobbyist’s home. Yet the company’s small crew of nine turns out thousands of oars and paddles annually.

The company, founded by Frank Tenney, was originally called Orono Manufacturing Company and made broom and tool handles in addition to oars and paddles. In the 1890s, Tenney merged his business with the George

Shaw Company, a Boston oar and paddle maker. Renamed Shaw & Tenney, it eventually moved from its original location straddling a tiny island in the Stillwater River to downtown Orono. For years, they occupied the same spot as the present-day Swett’s Garage on Main Street before moving to Water Street.

S&T was acquired in 1978 by Paul Reagan, who revitalized it by shifting sales from wholesale to the more profitable retail market, setting the business on a promising course for the twenty-first century. A fine woodworker, Reagan had a hand in every aspect of the operation, from the first step of carefully tracing in pencil the pattern of the particular oar or paddle on the wood stock, to hand-sewing leathers on the freshly varnished oar shafts. He took the time to promote his products properly, attending boat shows and other key events.

Much of S&T’s success lies in the quality of the raw material used to make its oars and paddles. The company primarily uses clear, solid, eastern red spruce supplied exclusively by two Maine mills located within 50 miles of Orono. Nary a knot, blemish, wormhole, pitch pocket, or other imperfection can be found in the raw lumber that becomes an oar or paddle.

“The wood itself is an anomaly because it is so rare,” Holt said. “Only one in every 2,000 boards that are sawn goes into our oars.” He makes a practice of eyeballing every single board, considering the unique natural pattern of the grain before marking out the shape of the oar or paddle to come. “That way,” he explained, “I control the grain of the wood that goes into each piece and get the greatest yield out of the lumber.”

Like Paul Reagan, Steve Holt sets and

The modern era, top to bottom: Tracing a pattern, Turning a shaft on a lathe, A rack of paddles ready for final shaping, Hand-shaping an oar grip.

44

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

WINTER 2009

|

Issue 102

continuing and top paddles in America. maintains high standards of craftsmanship. “I don’t ask anybody to do anything that I don’t know how to do myself,” he said.

Originally from Glastonbury, Connecticut, Holt is a skilled paddler and sailor, having taught canoeing as a teen at summer camp and raced International One Design sloops off Mount Desert Island. A 1979 University of Maine graduate, he majored in forestry engineering and has a Master’s degree in business. He has brought to the company a breadth of professional experience; he has worked as a mechanical engineer, overseen the corporate affairs of a Maine fuel supplier, and run his own architectural, engineering, and construction firm. His wife and partner in Shaw & Tenney also has a wealth of expertise. Holding a Ph.D. in financial gerontology, she started her professional career as an auditor and tax accountant, has advised small businesses, and has served as executive vice president of a federal credit union. She is a fine photographer, too, capturing S&T’s daily operation in images featured on the company’s website.

The Holts, for all their modern business practices, greatly value the skilled workmen who handcraft their oars and paddles. Eddie Gowan, for example, originally from the southern Maine mill town of Westbrook, where he labored for two decades for pulp and paper producer S.D. Warren, has worked with wood much of his life. In his practiced hands, rough-cut blanks are shaped into light, strong, and well-proportioned oars and paddles.

The Holts also value the company’s original manufacturing methods and oar and paddle designs, some of which haven’t changed in 150 years. Most of the original machinery may have been replaced, but oar and paddle making remains labor intensive, requiring fine handto-eye coordination.

Shaw & Tenney oars are made in three basic styles: spoon bladed, flat bladed, and wide-bladed spoon.

Specialty patterns are available within those styles, among them square-loom, Racine, Grand Lake Stream, Algonquin, St. Lawrence Skiff, Adirondack Guide Boat, and others.

Once an oar or paddle pattern has been traced on a blank, there are multiple stages of manufacture. All oars are rough-cut on a bandsaw, then slab and cornering saws The difference between oars and paddles from Shaw & Tenney and other commercial makers lies in the finish work.

Shapes and styles are based on traditional patterns, and only the clearest, most stable lumber is used. www.maineboats.com

|

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

45

Nary a knot, blemish, wormhole, pitch

pocket, or other imperfection can be found in the raw lumber.

are used to trim excess wood and achieve the right weight and shape. Flat-bladed oars are rough-cut on a tablesaw, and their straight profile and weight further refined by eye on a bandsaw.

An heirloom lathe, an original piece of machinery that dates back to the midnineteenth century, is used to shape an oar’s shaft and handle. Oars over 7 feet long are given a tapered grip. A keg or barrel grip is standard on oars less than 7 feet long. A double grip (for two hands) is sometimes used for oars over 10 feet long. Other non-standard grips are available at an additional charge.

Andre deBardelaben, a designer and builder of high-performance rowing craft at Middle Path Boats in Edinburg, Pennsylvania, has furnished at least one pair of S&T oars with every fixed-seat rowboat that has left his shop for over 20 years.

46

“One thing I really like about S&T,” deBardelaben said, “is their willingness to make small changes to their products for small companies like mine without charging an arm and a leg.

They can do this because they are an organic company, not some computer-controlled plant that won’t tolerate variation. You tell the craftsmen what you want. If it makes sense, they will make it for you.”

“It’s rare to find a piece of manila rope, tarred marline, a good rigging knife, or a decent canvas ditty bag these days,” said veteran oarsman and Book of Rowing author David C. Churbuck of Cotuit, Massachusetts. Churbuck, a digital media executive, rowed on Yale University’s varsity heavyweight crew from 1976 to 1978. “The number of people who can worm-and-parcel or caulk a

seam with oakum, let alone who own a caulking mallet, is sadly getting fewer and farther between these days. Thanks to the wooden boat revival, there is a market for Shaw & Tenney products.

Heck, if I put a year in my garage handcrafting a white Atlantic cedar skiff, I would want an excellent pair of oars to row it with.”

For 150 years, Shaw & Tenney has produced just that.

Letitia Baldwin is a freelance writer who lives in Gouldsboro, Maine.

Shaw & Tenney products are widely available, but can be purchased directly from the Maine company online at www.shawandtenney.com. It is also possible to visit the workshop, located at 20 Water Street in Orono, Maine. 800-240-4867 or 207-866-4867.

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

WINTER 2009

|

Issue 102