Photo of painting of HENRIETTA

Photo of painting of HENRIETTA

Ship HENRIETTA at sea. Name visible in painting. "Built in South Carolina," effectively combines illustrations and illuminations to explain the huge amount of resources needed to construct the square-rigged HENRIETTA. With a backdrop of brick walls and canvas partitions, the HENRIETTA'S story is told in a series of photos, maps, paintings, diagrams and narratives. Robert "Mac" McAlister's book published in 2011, "Wooden Ships on Winyah Bay," discusses the HENRIETTA, and his recently published book, "The Lumber Boom of Coastal South Carolina: Nineteenth-Century Shipbuilding & the Devastation of Low country Virgin Forests," goes into even more detail about this dramatic historic event. In 1874 William McGilvery and Captain Jonathan C. Nickels decided to build a 200-foot-long, 3-masted square rigged cargo ship at Bucksville, SC, located a short distance north of present-day Bucksport, SC. It was 1874 when William McGilvery and Captain Jonathan C. Nickels decided to build a 200-foot-long, square-rigged Downeaster (an advanced for the times 3-masted square rigged cargo ship) at Bucksville, SC. Located a short distance north of present-day Bucksport, SC, Bucksville once had 700 residents who worked in a thriving local logging industry. The partners enlisted more than a dozen friends and relatives to finance construction of South Carolina's first and only Downeaster, and in the fall of 1874 more than 100 craftsmen arrived in Bucksville from the shipbuilding Mecca of Searsport, Maine. First 1.3 million feet of wood, mostly longleaf pine, had to be cut and milled, and then the building began. The exhibit includes a section of a virgin bald cypress log cut during this time that was a sapling in the 13th century. "The men worked from sunup to sundown, six days a week, throughout the cold drizzly winter," McAlister writes. "As the frames were tilted upright by block and tackle, their tops extended more than forty feet above the river, higher than anything else in the little village behind the ship. When the 200-foot-long ship was framed up, she looked like a cathedral. Steamboats and flats, passing Bucksville on their way to and from Georgetown, gawked at the huge structure rising on the riverbank." After almost eight months, the HENRIETTA was "…201 feet long, 39 feet wide, 24 feet deep when loaded and 13 feet deep as launched." She was so immense, McAlister said, a raft of empty turpentine barrels had to be used to help tow her into deep water, and she still scraped bottom a few times. Once in Charleston the ship was rigged with 24 sails and, "She carried a skysail on her mainmast, whose topmast towered 147 feet above the deck." After the HENRIETTA left South Carolina, she never returned. Her building cost of $77,368.06 turned out to be a wise investment as she spent the next 19 years sailing the world and delivering cargo, including being one of the last sailing ships to deliver tea from China to New York City. The only known photograph of the Henrietta was taken in Kobe, Japan, in 1894 just after a typhoon ran her aground and destroyed her bottom. "All of the pine and oak timbers from the forests of Bucksville, South Carolina, were cut into small pieces and sold in bundles to the citizens of Kobe for use in their stoves and fireplaces," McAlister wrote. Such ambitious wooden shipbuilding was never again attempted in South Carolina. The HENRIETTA was among the last major square-rigged wooden ships ever built in the world before steam engines and iron frames dominated the industry. The town of Bucksville was established by Henry Buck, also founder of Bucksport, Maine. Buck moved to South Carolina in the 1820s to start lumber mills near the vast sources of cypress, pine and hardwoods. One of Buck's mills was in what became Bucksport, South Carolina. Sawmills in Bucksport and Bucksville produced 3 million board feet of lumber annually by 1850. Buck used his ships to transport lumber to Georgetown and Charleston in South Carolina; New York City; Boston; and even to other countries. Lumber from Buck's operations even went into the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Buck took crews of Maine shipbuilders to Bucksville to work on building wooden vessels, but this operation only lasted a few years as the men wanted to return to Maine. The most well-known vessel built in Bucksville was the ship Henrietta. How was it that the Henrietta was born near Georgetown? It started in Maine. The Bucks were a prominent shipbuilding and lumber family that founded Bucksport, Maine. By the early 1800's the forests of New England were not depleted but "picked over", and choice trees were getting hard to find. A young family member, Henry Buck, went forth in the 1820's on a foraging mission to the South to find new timber sources. On a venture up the Waccamaw River north of Georgetown, Henry began salivating when he saw the cypress swamps and the virgin long leaf pines. To a lumberman, it was a gold strike. He dropped the Buck family anchor on the spot, bought a slave, and got to work. He set up his sawmill on the Waccamaw, and since the Buck family custom was to name towns after themselves, Henry named his new location Bucksville. (Later, he built another sawmill downstream and named it Bucksport; both these communities still exist in Horry County though lumbering is long gone.) Soon, ships were sailing past Georgetown to Bucksville and loading up with cypress and hard pine. New England shipbuilders were afraid of Carolina pine to begin with, but soon they saw that it was durable planking timber, and Henry Buck helped promote their change of heart. Buck prospered in the mid-1800'sand was reputed to be the richest man in the Horry District. He owned 300 slaves at his pinnacle, an intriguing dissimilarity to his family in Maine. When the guns sounded at Fort Sumter, Buck supported the Confederate cause with his wealth, but he did not want to see a breakup of the Union. His position was schizophrenic, but his lumber business kept growing nonetheless. At one time during the second half of the 19th Century, Bucksville was the third largest port in South Carolina, and Buck's lumber business was the reason. Buck had maintained hi Maine family ties notwithstanding the breach in Civil War sympathies. Since the Maine operations included a sizable shipbuilding enterprise, it began to make sense to build ships in South Carolina, now that Carolina hard pine had proven itself, and the mild climate was inviting compared to the harsh Maine winters. Henry Buck died in 1870, but the decision to build ships in South Carolina was taken up by his son, William Buck. Expert shipwrights and millwrights moved down from Maine to Bucksville, and their first construction was a three-masted schooner called the Hattie McGilvery Buck. (There's that name again.) Encouraged by the success of his first vessel, it was decided to go big-time. More ship carpenters, blacksmiths, caulkers, and riggers were recruited from Maine, and the result was that on April 29, 1875, the Henrietta was launched at Bucksville. She was a magnificent vessel comparing favorably in size and quality to the best of the New England ships. However, the construction costs turned out to be somewhat higher than Maine-built boats. Also, finding skilled local workmen became a problem. A third factor dissuading the building of more big ships was the shallows encountered in getting a ship to sea forty miles away. Nevertheless, Henrietta spent 19 glorious years sailing the Pacific before being wrecked by a typhoon near Japan in 1894. But Henrietta had done proud by making a big splash with her South Carolina timbers.