WILLOW CREEK — A chapter of Willow Creek history closed forever this week when William Thorne, the third-generation shipwright and proprietor of Thorne & Sons Shipworks, announced the permanent closure of the family’s vessel-building operation after seventy-eight years of continuous work.
The last vessel to leave the yard, the sixty-eight-foot sloop Lydia Barnes, was launched in 1882. Since then, the yard has maintained only a skeleton crew for repair work as the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad absorbed the shipping traffic that had sustained the yard for three generations.
“The whistle of the locomotive has replaced the cry of the shipwright,” Thorne said in a statement to the Gazette. “The railroad has brought Willow Creek goods and passengers that the river could never carry. But it has also brought the end of a trade that this family has practised since before Maine was a state.”
The closing idles the remaining six men. The Thorne family’s shipbuilding tradition began in 1803 when Ezra Thorne launched a forty-two-foot unnamed river sloop from the natural deep-water pool at the bend. Over the following decades, the yard produced forty-seven documented vessels. At its peak in the 1840s, it employed over 130 men and supported a satellite economy of sawpits, ropewalks, and blacksmith forges along the riverbank.
“The yard was this town’s reason for being,” said Elijah Cook, 72, who worked at Thorne & Sons for thirty-four years. “Now the reason is the depot. The young men are learning the railroad trades. And I suppose that is progress. But it is hard to watch the yard go silent.”