Our mission, now more important than ever...
The nonprofit Gundalow Company’s mission “to protect the Piscataqua Region’s maritime heritage and environment through education and action” is more important than ever. Thousands of students each year spend a few hours sailing onboard the world’s only Piscataqua Gundalow. They learn how gundalows were built here to carry lumber, salt marsh hay, oysters, bricks, pipe staves and coal on the shallow rivers where big ships could not go. Through a series of hands-on activities, students get a glimpse of the past 300 years on the working waterfront, and explore issues like water quality, habitat protection, stewardship, navigation. It is our belief that the Gundalow Company is well-positioned to collaborate with partners to generate publicity, awareness, and action relating to the health of the Piscataqua Maritime Region and the Great Bay Estuary. Looking ahead, the Gundalow Company aims to be a leader in efforts to inspire stewardship of the Piscataqua Region’s environmental and maritime legacies. Our strategic alliances with a number of organizations within the Piscataqua Watershed serve to protect its “sense of place.”
The Piscataqua Gundalow History
On a rainy day in June, 1982, the replica gundalow Captain Edward H. Adams was launched into the Piscataqua River while several hundred people lined the banks to watch this historic event. It took an impressive community effort to build the 70′ replica on the grounds of Strawbery Banke Museum, with a group of dedicated shipwrights and volunteers led by local legendary boat builder Bud McIntosh. This event celebrated the hundreds of cargo-carrying gundalows built in the Piscataqua Region starting in 1650. At the same time, it celebrated the 20th-century creation of a unique teaching platform that travelled to Piscataqua region riverfront towns carrying a message that raised awareness of this region’s maritime heritage and the environmental threats to our rivers.
For just over 25 years, the Adams was used as a dock-side attraction so people could learn about the role of gundalows in this region’s economic development as well as hundreds of years of human impact on the estuary. When the Gundalow Company inherited the Adams from Strawbery Banke Museum in 2002, the opportunity to build a new gundalow that could sail with students and the public became a priority. For the next decade, we continued the programs on the Adams while pursuing the vision to build a gundalow that could be more than a dock-side attraction.
In 2011 we built Piscataqua – a new traditional gundalow – on the grounds of Strawbery Banke, using time-honored methods and materials. However, unlike the Adams, Piscataqua is designed to take students and the public sailing! The programs onboard Piscataqua weave together environmental science, history, and maritime heritage, providing a unique educational experience for students of all ages. The strategic decision to build a gundalow certified by the US Coast Guard means that, for the first time, the public is able to sail on a regionally-significant historic vessel.
Today, the nonprofit Gundalow Company’s mission “to protect the Piscataqua Region’s maritime heritage and environment through education and action” is more important than ever. Thousands of students each year spend a few hours sailing onboard the world’s only Piscataqua Gundalow. They learn how gundalows were built here to carry lumber, salt marsh hay, oysters, bricks, pipe staves and coal on the shallow rivers where big ships could not go. Through a series of hands-on activities, students get a glimpse of the past 300 years on the working waterfront, and explore issues like water quality, habitat protection, stewardship, navigation.
It is our belief that the Gundalow Company is well-positioned to collaborate with partners to generate publicity, awareness, and action relating to the health of the Piscataqua Maritime Region and the Great Bay Estuary. Looking ahead, the Gundalow Company aims to be a leader in efforts to inspire stewardship of the Piscataqua Region’s environmental and maritime legacies. Our strategic alliances with a number of organizations within the Piscataqua Watershed serve to protect its “sense of place.”
We also believe that all people have the right to access, enjoy, and learn from the Piscataqua region’s heritage and ecology. We recognize that systemic inequality and exclusion have infringed upon this right. The Gundalow Company is committed to working in partnership with those who have been historically and are currently excluded from access to and stewardship of the local waterways. Just as the Piscataqua River is strengthened by every stream, river, and creek that flows to it, our community is strengthened by individuals from a diversity of experiences, identities, cultures, heritages, perspectives, and values, who historically and currently use, access, and enjoy the resources of the Piscataqua Watershed.
An Audacious Dream—The Building of the gundalow PISCATAQUA
By Caroline Amport Piper
The launch of the gundalow PISCATAQUA ten years ago marked the arrival of a long imagined future. Now a decade later, the big red boat with its odd looking rig and giant sail, so unlike any other vessel on the river today, is a connection to both the past and the future. We of course have the benefit of knowing how the story turned out. Yet success was far from guaranteed. The Gundalow Company’s visionary, passionate and ambitious founding staff and long serving board members were committed to their vision to build, not just a replica historic vessel, but a Coast Guard Certified passenger vessel. As the Great Recession was still throwing a wake, they set about raising the $1.2 million it would take to build the boat and maintain it through the first years of operation.
The project was an audacious and expensive undertaking that would involve not only the design and construction of the boat itself, but the creation of a full scale shipyard on the grounds of one of the United States’ most prominent historic museums. It would pull resources and generate support from all corners of the community. It would, of course, involve a range of skilled shipwrights and other craftsmen, but also landscapers to grade (and then regrade) the site, electricians to run power, cranes to lift roof trusses and walls into place
(and then remove them), and the construction of a second building to house the tools. And all of this would be on display for the public to watch, learn and question.
Truly, it was a staggering undertaking. Together a combination of paid and volunteer
crew worked enthusiastically and tirelessly month after month to turn the dream of the PISCATAQUA into a reality. Temperatures fluctuated, saws hummed and dust flew, knees were shaped, trunnels were pounded, planks were steamed, seams were caulked and slowly, but surely, the boat began to take shape. At every step of the way museum visitors, event attendees and the general public looked on, curious to see something they never had seen before—the building of a gundalow using traditional boat building techniques.
As 2011 drew to a close, the once unthinkable became believable. A 64 foot gundalow was ready for launch. On a cold December morning, building movers expertly maneuvered the boat out of the shipyard, across the street, over the Pierce Island Bridge and into the water for the first time. The PISCATAQUA was born.
Now, ten years later it seems as though this boat has always been here. And in many ways it has. Or at least its ancestors have. For gundalows were fixtures on these rivers for hundreds of years. Today, instead of transporting goods along the rivers the gundalow PISCATAQUA inspires the environmentalists, historians and stewards of tomorrow. The PISCATAQUA lets us explore and know the rivers that define this place, and offers a chance for all of us to step away from our land-bound lives and reflect back—at the shoreline, our maritime history, and our place in the world at-large. We are eternally grateful to all those who dared to dream that this was possible and to those who played a role in making the gundalow PISCATAQUA a reality.
Large and small, these countless contributions defined the very essence of the project and the region itself.
We are many, but we are also one. The water connects us all. And the PISCATAQUA is our boat. Happy 10th Anniversary PISCATAQUA. May your time on the water be as long as the current is fast.