Maritime Heritage Paul Palmer

Built in Waldoboro, Maine, the five-masted, 276-foot schooner Paul Palmer carried bulk cargos throughout the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean. During its 12-year career, the schooner Paul Palmer transported 280,000 tons of coal, as well as phosphate, railroad ties, ice, and sugar. After unloading coal in Bangor, Paul Palmer departed Rockport, Maine, for Virginia on Friday, June 13, 1913. Sailing south, the schooner caught fire off Cape Cod. Several vessels responded to the stricken schooner, but were unable to extinguish the fire. The schooner’s crew abandoned ship and was picked up by a waiting fishing boat. The Paul Palmer burned to its waterline and then sank. The Paul Palmer was the only five-masted East Coast schooner to be lost to fire.

Schooner Jennie R. Dubois

On February 11th, 1902, in West Mystic, Connecticut, the largest coasting schooner built outside of the Maine shipyards slid down the ways of the Holmes Shipbuilding Company. Nineteen months later the Jennie R. Dubois, sunk in a collision with the Steamship Schoenfels, was resting on the sandy bottom southeast of Block Island, Rhode Island. Once cleared as a menace to navigation, the Dubois was lost to history and her location remained unknown to local divers and historians.
You are cordially invited to attend a public presentation (by Mark Munro the diver who found the wreck) on the Jennie R. Dubois February 11th, 2009 Seven o’clock in the evening Mystic Yachting Center, Mystic Shipyard, West Mystic Connecticut. For the rest of the story CLICK HERE.