Three Decades, Built the Old Way

The names of the wooden boats they build by hand are a metaphor for the work they do: sturdy, elegant and graceful, even a bit mysterious. Spoken aloud, they take on their own poetic rhythm. Rebecca, Juno, Epiphany. Zorra. Ilona, Elita, Christine. Hope.

These are just a few of the names of the many schooners, yawls and ketches that have quietly populated the waters around the Vineyard and beyond through the years, thanks to Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin, who have just as quietly held their place on the Vineyard Haven waterfront with their remarkable boatyard.

To that end, this weekend is cause for celebration as Gannon and Benjamin marks its thirtieth anniversary at the boatyard and marine railway that takes it place today as an important landmark on the Island.

The history of the boatyard is inextricably woven with the history of the Vineyard itself, where Vineyard Haven was a crucial first (or last) stop for commercial vessels seeking refuge or a place to resupply themselves, either before or after they had braved the most perilous series of geographic corners on the long and busy coastal highway between New York and Boston. Vineyard Haven supplied pilots for these ships and the town had a hospital and a bethel to minister to sailors. There were shipyards to tend to the vessels, lofts to repair sails and stores to supply the ships with the things they needed.

And alone among nearly every other port and harbor on the eastern seaboard, Vineyard Haven never really left the age of commercial sailing. The last sailing vessel to carry freight along the coastline — the swift and beautiful schooner Alice S. Wentworth — worked out of the Vineyard Haven harbor under her legendary master Capt. Zeb Tilton through the early Nineteen Forties, long after the railroads, trucks, steamers, tugs and barges had made the work of commercial schooners all but obsolete.

And even the end of the Wentworth failed to mark the end of schooners in Vineyard Haven; in Nineteen Sixty-Four the topsail schooner Shenandoah sailed into Vineyard Haven harbor with the man who designed her and has skippered her ever since at the helm: Robert S. Douglas. The Shenandoah is of a piece in this remarkable tale of maritime history.

And by keeping itself successfully in the business of sailing, both Vineyard Haven and the Island naturally attracted people who admired wooden boats, or worked on them. Many bought and sailed wooden boats of their own, and along the way a wooden boat community formed. The heart of that community has long been the Vineyard Haven harbor, with Gannon and Benjamin at the very center of it all.

When they established their yard at the head of the harbor in Nineteen Eighty, Nat Benjamin and Ross Gannon recognized that there was a need for a boatyard that could look after all these sailors and their wooden boats. And with Nat’s design skills and Ross’s engineering bent, it was, as the saying goes, a perfect marriage.

Nat and Ross build their boats the original way, by fastening planks of wood to timbers, every piece individually measured, cut and beveled. A Gannon and Benjamin boat is built exactly the same way that Old Ironsides was built — but it is important to say that they do this not because it is quaint or old-fashioned, but because for these two men who have spent a lifetime on the water, it is the most enduring, pleasurable, reliable and rewarding way to do it. Working this way, they have rebuilt and restored some of the loveliest and most iconic wooden boats on the East Coast. In a world addicted to the latest thing, Gannon and Benjamin stands out as a master class in how to work at something full-time, without compromise and to the highest skill level possible.

And Nat and Ross would never argue that wooden boats are better than other kinds of boats. They simply believe that anything of value should be looked after carefully, and they know that wooden boats require their own kind of care, just like fiberglass or aluminum boats.

There are many great stories about the boatyard and the boats that were built there, far too many to recount in this space. And no doubt some of those stories will be spun like so many good yarns at the celebration tomorrow afternoon on the Vineyard Haven harbor.

But certainly one of the seminal moments in the history of Gannon and Benjamin was in Nineteen Eighty-Nine when the yard burned to the ground in a fire and the Island community rallied to rebuild it.

A quote from Mr. Gannon that year is captured in the book Schooner, written by Tom Dunlop and published this year by Vineyard Stories. Ross said: “I never knew we were a successful boatyard until we burned down.”

Built the old way across three decades, Gannon and Benjamin is one of the Island’s best success stories of all.