The Lettie G. Haward and Her People by Norman Brouwer, Curator of Ships, South Street Seaport Museum
It would be hard to find a fleet of hi storic vessels with more diverse origins than those collected over the last twenty years by the South Street Seaport Museum. Consider the 2, 100-ton, 294ft iron full-rigged shipWavertree, which sailed from the great English seaport of Liverpool and was acquired by the museum in 1968. The former suburban estate of R . W. Leyland , Wavertree's owner, visited early last year by the author on a trip to Liverpool, is a showplace of Victorian splendor with its landscaped grounds, grand stairways, etchedglass sky lights, and richly decorated plaster ceilings. Somewhere toward the other end of the social and economic scale lie the origins of South Street's 75ft wooden fishing schooner Lettie G. Ho ward, acquired as the Museum's first sailing vessel, just before the Wavertree. The schooner's builder, Arthur D. Story of Essex, Massachusetts, was the principal owner when the vessel was launched in 1893 , but the captain, Fred Howard of Beverly put together the backing to build this schooner and he named her for his daughter, Lettie Gould Howard. Lettie, who undoubtedly christened the schooner, was born 22 years earlier when the family lived in Deer Isle, Maine. Captain Howard had moved to Beverly by 1888, where he lived until he disappears from the record in 1921 at the age of 73. The streets on which he lived survive in Beverly today , hardly altered in nearly a century. They are mostly narrow , slightly meandering, lined with very modest frame dwellings on tiny lots that crowd the sidewalks and each other. At hi s home, 26 Railroad Avenue, hi s daughter Lettie was married in 1896 to Pearl Tremaine Barron, a printer of Salem, Massachusetts. Captain Fred Howard 's venture into captain-owner status was brief. He gave up command of the schooner he had named Sailing into City Island en route lo New York's Fulton Market , the for hi s daughter in 1895 after just two years. Six years later the Lettie G. Howard glides along on a breath of moming air, Peter boat was "sold south," to work in the red snapper fishery out Stanford at the helm. Photo, Bob Ferraro. of Pensacola, Florida. Frederick Howard continued to command fishing schooners for other owners. Research is under- 1923. Subsequently a rebuilt schooner named Mystic C. way to fill in the remaining detail s of the lives of Captain appeared . When this vessel was brought north to Gloucester Frederick Howard and hi s daughter Lettie, and we hope in the mid- I 960s the group responsible believed her to be the someday to locate living decendants of the first captain of rebuilt Caviare , built in Essex , Massachusetts in 1891. But South Street's fishing schooner. Caviare was wrecked on a reef off Mexico in 1916, and there The Lettie G. Howard spent just eight years in the New was no record of her having been salvaged , and no evidence England fisheries, operating out of Beverly and Gloucester. of her existence between 1916 and 1923. After the schooner One of the smaller class of vessels of her type, she worked the was acquired by the South Street Seaport Museum under the banks closer to home, particularly Georges Bank east of Cape name Caviare in 1968 , investigations were launched to deterCod. She fished for cod caught with hand 1in es from one or two mine the true identity of what was so clearly a Gloucester hull. man dories, gutted and cleaned on the deck of the schooner, Late in 1969 William J. Broughton of Birmingham, Alabama and salted down in the hold. When she went south to the Gulf interviewed H.L. Mertyns, who had operated the marine of Mexico in 1901 she was entering quite a different fi shery . railway of the Warren Seafood Company of Pensacola, a Here the entire crew manned the weather rail to fish for red rai lway also used by E.E. Saunders & Co., owners of the snapper, while the vessel with its wheel lashed was allowed to Mystic C., to overhaul and repair its vessels. Mertyns had a log drift off slowl y to leeward. The skipper fished next to the for the railway with a page for each vessel hauled in the period wheelbox, and the cook next to hi s companionway. The rest 1921-34. As Broughton and Mertyns leafed through the log of the men were arranged along the rail according to their they found a page for the L ettie G. Howard. The name Lettie seniority. G. Howard had been crossed out and above it written, " name Northern-built schooners continued to dominate the snap- changed to Mystic C." per fishing fleet well into this century. When boats had spent Historian John Lyman then searched federal records and twenty years or so in the fi sher!}' they were generally hauled the Pensacola papers of the period, and determined that the out and thoroughly rebuilt, acquiring in the process new Mystic C. was the Howard rebuilt. In 1971 the South Street names and new official numbers. Some boats were also built Seaport Museum gave the ship back the name Lettie G. on the Gulf in thi s century. Gulf builders usually gave their Howard. Launched in 1893, rebuilt in 1923, she is now in need vessels more beam than the New England builders. They also of another major rebuilding, just short of her centennial, to get dispensed with the break in the deck so popular in New her sa iling again. .i. England, which had provided eight or ten inches of additional headroom aft, preferring instead to build, or rebuild , their Mr. Brouwer is author of The International Register of Hisschooners flush-decked . toric Ships (Sea History Press, $29.75 ), and former trustee of The Lettie G. Howard was dropped from enrollment in NMHS. SEA HISTORY , SPRING 1989
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