For 27 years, apprentices at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid have built peapods, dinghies and other small craft in an inadequately lighted and drafty chicken barn with low beams sure to raise a lump on many a tall worker’s head. Ruth and Bobby Ives and the first group of apprentices and volunteers had reclaimed the barn by shoveling out three inches of manure and scrubbing every inch.
Now, the Boat Shop (WWF June 03) is building a totally new 5,600-square-foot facility that has high ceilings to accommodate proper ventilation equipment, light streaming in from windows on all sides, a wood fired furnace and radiant heat, plenty of insulation, a sprinkler system and an elevator and handicapped accessible bathroom.
To fund the new workshop, and to create an endowment that will help cover operating expenses (up to now, paid for by the sale of boats, restoration work and donations) the Boat Shop is launching an almost million dollar capital campaign, which will also establish an Ives retirement fund.
This campaign, so exciting and promising in its support of the Boat Shop’s mission, is accompanied by great loss for the Ives family and Boat Shop community. Ruth Ives, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, Giloblastoma Multiforme, in 2003, and through the success of experimental treatment, was in remission for three and one-half years.She was able to participate in developing the new plans, but died at home on Nov. 13, 2006.
Despite their sorrow, the community of teachers, apprentices and other workers and volunteers has united to make it possible for the Boat Shop to continue its work of service to others. As Bobby Ives wrote in the Fall Newsletter, “But life goes on, and we can assure you that it does so at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop. Ruth would want it no other way.”
Bobby and Ruth Ives, who had previously served as minister and schoolteacher on Monhegan Island and at the Methodist churches in Round Pond and New Harbor, and served Sheepscot Community Church while living on Loud’s Island, created the Boat Shop ministry to provide a safe haven for people whose lives are in transition. Each year, ten (12 this year) apprentices ranging in ages from their late teens to 70s, who may be between jobs, preparing for retirement, recovering from addictions or taking a year off from school, are given the opportunity to sort out their lives while building Shaker furniture, restoring other people’s boats and building new boats. Most have no prior experience with tools or boatbuilding. The apprentices help out with community chores such as gardening, preparing and cleaning up after meals and cutting wood; they perform service in the Pemaquid area and they spend time on the water.
Apprentices drop anchor at the Boat Shop in September, and although some remain to teach or help out in ensuing years, most weigh anchor nine months later to continue their journey. During their stay, Bobby Ives says he and Ruth hoped that in addition to developing practical skills, “they would learn community decision making, develop a strong sense of presence about themselves, and gain confidence and assuredness about their direction in life.”
According to former apprentices, the effect of their nine months at the Boat Shop is beyond measure. “Bobby and Ruth were the lifeblood of my experience,” says Gillan Davis of Damariscotta. “I’ve never known such unfailing love, support, generosity, energy and power of positivity. Their lives are their lessons, and aspiring boatbuilders like myself learn far more about the human spirit than we might ever expect.”
Hundreds of lives have been enriched by the Ives’s love and dedication. Clergy, social workers and teachers are invited to spend sabbaticals at the Boat Shop. A wide variety of people attend summer workshops in building Shaker chairs, small boats and green wood spoon carving. For the past three years, apprentices have tutored students in Bristol Elementary School and have helped seventh and eighth grade students from Damariscotta, Nobleboro and Bristol Schools build wood carriers, tool boxes and skiffs at the workshop.
Apprentices also volunteer time to support the Community Housing Improvement Project (CHIP) established by Ruth Ives to ensure that no resident of the surrounding area should ever be without warmth and shelter. Apprentices repair homes, build wheelchair ramps, shovel snow and help out in myriad other small ways. “People know we’re always here to be asked,” Bobby Ives says.
Volunteers from the Boat Shop also pick up, repair and store furniture and appliances area residents no longer need and distribute them to needy families without charge. The old workshop chicken barn will now serve as the CHIP furniture exchange.
Originally, the step from the humble chicken barn to a safer workshop facility wasn’t going to be quite so huge. With funds from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, the Boat Shop planned to build a new foundation for an existing barn which it had acquired in 2003, when, in partnership with the Damariscotta River Association and Pemaquid Watershed Association, it purchased land and buildings on Crooked Farm, an adjacent property.
After apprentices spent two and a half years renovating the farmhouse to provide living quarters for two instructors and their families and four apprentices, it was time to consider the barn. Bobby Ives relates that builder John Libby of Freeport advised that they take it down, number the pieces, lay a concrete foundation to replace the rubble stone foundation, then re-construct the building. Apprentices and other volunteers set to work, and two and a half months later, the barn was a pile of wood next to the foundation. But Ives was worried. “As we took it apart, we kept finding wood rot and beetles,” he says. “I felt that it might not be safe.”
When a barn builder from Connecticut offered to buy the pile as it was, the Boat Shop board of directors convinced Ives they should develop a capital campaign to finance a new barn that would be the centerpiece for future programs. Although apprentices and other volunteers will do much of the finish work, he and the board chose Bevel Cove Builders of Owls Head to construct the new barn so that apprentices could focus on their boatbuilding program. Bevel Cove Builders seemed particulary appropriate, Ives says, because they are connected with the Amish Community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose lives and work exemplify the simplicity, dignity and beauty that are integral to life at the Boat Shop. Amish carpenters would cut out the frame and bring it to Pemaquid. On Aug. 31, over 250 friends of the Boat Shop joined to celebrate the completion of this old-fashioned barn raising.
Next fall, new apprentices will work in this modern facility, which was designed by a former apprentice, Fred Lilly, now associated with Boothbay Home Builders. On the first floor of the roomy building, where a stairway wide enough for passage of small craft neatly divides the building space in half, there will be a machine shop on the left and a paint and varnish room on the right. Upstairs, there is ample room for building boats and furniture. The third floor, where supporting beams create a chapel-like nave with the roof slanting on either side, provides space for lofting and meetings and bookshelves for the library.
It is a long reach from the day in 1979 when Ruth and Bobby Ives moved to Pemaquid from the parsonage in New Harbor. Bobby Ives says they had practically nothing, so their neighbors organized a “pounding party” to welcome them into the community. “Everyone brought a pound of something,” he says: “kitchen staples like flour and sugar, but also, pounds of tools, furniture, and woodworking machinery, including all the important tools to set up an entire boat shop.” People were so generous, he recalls, that he and Ruth lost no time starting their boatbuilding ministry.
Now, the Carpenter’s Boat Shop Board is asking its widespread community established over 27 years and others for support. They hope all will agree with former apprentice Phillips Sweet of Sturgeon, Wisconsin, who wrote, “I know of no place on the earth where such a community like this exists and I would do anything in my power to see that it continues.”
Sweet continued, “…for me it remains a reality that it is possible, a hope, that we can make the world into an image that is visible and lived out in this small Boat Shop on the coast of Maine. It is my reference for hope in the world.”
For further information about the Boat Shop, see “Person Building” The Carpenter’s Boat Shop builds more than boats,” June, 2003 at www.workingwaterfront.com. To contribute to the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, contact Wayne Roberts at 440 Old Country Road, Pemaquid, ME 04558 or call 207-677-2614.