The exposed hewn beams in the ceiling of The Dry Dock restaurant were cut from white pine in the winter of 1802, felled somewhere in the forests north of Willow Creek and hauled by oxen to the river bend where Ezra Thorne was building his shipyard.
They have held up a roof for 224 years.
Thorne & Sons Shipworks, founded in 1803 by Ezra Thorne — the same Ezra Thorne who presided over Willow Creek’s first town meeting in 1797 — launched its first vessel that year from the natural deep-water pool at the bend in the Willow River. Over the next eight decades, the yard launched 47 known vessels: river sloops and shallops built for carrying lumber, potash, and lime downriver to the Penobscot and ultimately to the coastal ports at Bangor and Belfast.
At its peak, the yard employed over 130 men — a substantial fraction of the town’s population — and supported a satellite economy of sawpits, ropewalks, and blacksmith forges along the riverbank. The vessels were not large by ocean-going standards — the final vessel, the Lydia Barnes, was 68 feet — but they were built to the standards of Bath and Rockland, with dovetailed joinery and copper-fastened planking that spoke to a tradition brought from the coast.
“It was an unlikely industry for a town seventy miles inland,” says Town Historian Jed Thorne, the great-great-grandson of Ezra Thorne. “But the river made it possible — the bend created a deep pool perfect for launching — and the Maine timber made it profitable. You could build a sloop in Willow Creek for a third of what it cost in Bath, because the raw material was growing right outside the yard gates.”
The end came swiftly. The Bangor & Aroostook Railroad reached Willow Creek in 1884, making river shipping obsolete. The dry dock at Thorne’s Bend was filled in and planted over.
For decades, the boat shed sat empty, slowly settling into the riverbank. Then, in 2010, Dean Moreau — whose father had worked at the mill for 38 years — returned to Willow Creek and saw what everyone else had overlooked.
“Walking into that building for the first time, I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” Moreau says. “The beams, the light coming through the gaps in the boards, the way the floor sloped slightly toward the river — you could still feel the boats in there. I wanted to make something that honored that.”
The Dry Dock opened in 2011. Moreau kept the original beams exposed, hung period photographs on the walls, and named the private dining room after the Lydia Barnes. He gives a short history talk to every party that books it.
“People come for the food,” he says. “But they stay for the story.”