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Portland: A Port-of-Call On Time

by

David Morton

The decade of the 1850’s has been called the "Golden Age" of Portland Harbor. The shipyards, working at capacity, were building the great Clippers; the Snow Squall, the Black Squall, the Warner and the Grecian, as well as other vessels for the coastal trade. On different sides of the Fore River were a dry dock and a marine railway, two rope walks to produce the miles of cordage needed by these vessels, at least two cooperage’s employing 400 or more coopers, and other smaller industries ancillary to the ship building.
 

That was the decade when Commercial Street was built, with its new warehouses and rail tracks running from one end of the waterfront to the other. The long wharves, requiring unending maintenance, connecting Fore Street to deep water docking, were replaced. City Fathers spent in excess of $1,000,000 to accomplish this miracle of waterfront renewal.
 

One hundred and fifty years later, ‘what goes around comes around,’ and Portland Harbor again finds itself on what could well be the leading edge of a new golden era. In 1998, 253 vessels made anchorage here; in 1999, there were 375, a nearly 50% increase. From 16 cruise ship calls in 1999, we can expect 49 or more in 2000, and the numbers will keep growing.
 

Why is all this happening now? To make sense of this explosion of maritime activity coming upon us, keep in mind just a few simple but overwhelming facts. Americans, and affluent persons of every nation, are hungry for new sights and sounds, new faces and new stories and new places. Cruise ships provide the cheapest vacations that can be had anywhere. Many once "exotic" destinations have been ‘mined out’, or ‘over fished’ or whatever simile fits. Portland, Maine, looks refreshing, especially when compared to a day in Charlotte Amale on St. Thomas in the Caribbean, with six ships in port and 12,000 to 18,000 disembarked passengers packed, without plan or purpose, within blocks of one another. A new ‘golden age’, 150 years after the first one, is challenging the leaders of Greater Portland to plan and to build to accommodate the inevitable. All of us, residents and citizens of the area, can rest at least somewhat easier in the realization that our port authorities and political leadership is alert to what is coming and taking concrete steps to meet it. Success is driven by a dedicated team of professionals in the public and private sector who look after the ports future. These are exciting times for the museum for the harbor of Portland. Ours is the task of documenting this new golden era. We share the responsibility to help educate our citizenry about the facts of what is happening, and to place it in historical perspective. Our job is to reduce the “big picture” to manageable, understandable proportions, with documents, photographs, maps, charts, models, exhibits, lectures. Awesome!