The Wreck of the Schooner William Booth

Nona, I wish I told this back to you: 

Later, they called him King William. Maybe you knew this. Your great-grandfather. Your mother’s father’s father. Born sometime before 1850 in Aberdeen, Scotland, William Booth came to the States at eighteen and promptly got a job cutting stone. Before long his younger brothers joined him in New London, and for more than twenty years they worked the quarries of southeastern Connecticut, at Waterford, and southwestern Rhode Island, at Westerly. By 1888 the three brothers partnered with the Palmer crew at Millstone Point and re-leased the land together, dividing equal shares of Niantic paving stone. 

But two years later, the quarry owner Henry Gardner rejected their application for renewal, and William and his brothers found and purchased a 70-acre plot of granite ledge off Great Neck Road in Waterford. 

So began Booth Brothers Granite Company.

They did fine in southern New England, but they knew the finest granite was to the north. They found their way in when William brokered a merger with Hurricane Island Granite, a transaction that included quarrying rights to several quarries along the middle coast of Maine. 

They headquartered in New York but kept offices in Niantic and Rockland. The conglomerate was worth a quarter million dollars. And King William finally earned his name. At first even the stonecutters, dusty, overworked, prone to strike and discontent, praised the new structure. If King William was as successful at securing build contracts as he was at securing paving contracts, they were in for a prosperous future. 

Trips with the Switts were tradition. Clare and Will. Their dog, Cedar. Part wolf was what they always said. Like a shepherd with a golden coat. They were retired teachers from Connecticut who joined us in Maine, eventually found their own spot near the quarries in Tennant’s Harbor, and moved there for good. Sometimes they came to Molly’s Point to stay. Just the two of them and the dog in the downstairs bedroom. I have a photograph of Will with Cedar on the rocks. The tide is high in Christmas Cove behind them. 

Other times it was a long weekend somewhere. Rangeley. Quebec City. Moosehead Lake. Baxter State Park. One year we went to Vinalhaven. Route 1 north from Southport, and we met the Switts for coffee and caught the ferry from Rockland. The going was slow, you wrote. Our boat was fog-horning into the gray day. So were Breakwater Light and Owl’s Head. The sun broke through once we made it across Penobscot Bay, and we clanked off the ramp toward Lane’s Island Preserve. Five of us in the Switt’s wagon. I sat in the way way back behind you and Clare, facing the water behind us. 

You said the sightlines were remarkable. You loved where trees met ground met stone met sea. Watch for ticks in the grass and the hiking paths, you said. While the rest of us explored, you fell asleep from your Dramamine. Then we checked into our B & B and had happy hour on the porch.

Pa and Will said there were meteor showers later. 

Every August on certain clear nights the Perseid meteor paints the sky. It’s a tail from the Swift-Tuttle comet, a debris field, a cloud of space dust, a cycle, an orbit from the heavens. 

After supper Pa said we should go back to Lane’s Island. We found a spot in the meadow and put out a blanket. In minutes you were out again. I wish you could have seen it. Sometimes the sky looked like usual sky. Other times it was streaked with explosions of light. Some of those particles had been part of the comet for a thousand years.

In 1895, King William brought two blasting crews to Long Cove, a couple miles from the Switts’ place. He set them to work for a year with a steam powered drill and heaps of explosives. They engineered a series of tunnels deep into the eastern edge of the quarry and then brought in Charles Shuler from Graniteville, Missouri, who oversaw the placement of more than 500 charges and kegs of powder. The plan was to dislodge enough stone in one blast for several months of contracts. Five thousand people gathered to watch, and for about three thousand bucks, King William and his crews loosed hundreds of thousands of tons of middle coast granite.

Cousin Pat told a story about a bid they put into the Cincinnati Board of Aldermen. King William traveled to pitch them and brought with him a sample of what he claimed was another bidder’s stone.

Nothing more than chalk, he decried, and broke the stone between his teeth.

Then at Millstone Point a stone spire broke and crushed an ox. King William ordered the ox butchered and served to his crews for supper. 

His pal Billy Dean went to bed with an empty belly. 

Sir, he said, I won’t eat another worker.

One quarry on Vinalhaven produced columns for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan. Each shaft was some sixty feet long and eight feet thick. When they were first put on the lathe, they weighed 120 tons a piece. 

But the mainstay was paving blocks. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe more. Cutters began with a granite piece three feet thick, four feet by four feet. They used a thirty-pound hammer to slowly work the stone down to a block four-and-a-half inches deep, and four by twelve inches. A reliable man could produce 500 in a day. The record, allegedly, was nearly 800. 

Wives, sisters, and daughters cooked and cleaned, provided laundry and first aid. I imagine bacon. Fresh eggs. Salt cod and potatoes. Sludgy coffee. Farmer’s cheese. Boiled rags for bloody wounds. Bottles of moonshine. 

They lived in sprawling bunkhouses. The largest housed 500 bodies. I imagine dirt paths, ruts full of muck between the mess hall and sheds, every route eventually leading toward the quarry, and then to the edge of the sea. Saturday nights were rowdy, sometimes violent. 

Of course there were Scots. Irishmen too. The Italians came from the marble mines in Carrara, from Brescia, from Lombardy. They took trains through Milan, onto Paris, and boarded ships in Havre. Most were meeting brothers or cousins. Italian communities formed. Fort Trumbull and Harpswell. 

Sundays were picnic days. They gathered for bocci games in makeshift courts. They found shade and drank wine and gambled and told stories of their mothers in the old country.

In the carving sheds, the dust was so thick that some were stricken with stonecutters’ TB. The sanitariums, one nurse said, seemed so futile. She said visitors came to the doors full of chatter and good cheer, but inside they fell quiet.

But King William wouldn’t have worried about that. He counted pennies. While industry standard pay was around $2.75 a day, the Booth crews working on courthouse projects in Boston and Fall River were making just over $2.00 a day. Before the first of May in 1891, the Stonecutters’ Union struck at Millstone.

They struck another time when the Booths refused to replace their quarry and carving tools. Paid breaks and upgrades, King William, said, were not part of the Booth Brothers’ business plan. He said they’d rather shut down than give in to such demands.

Your grandfather, King William’s son, died when you were very young, but you said you remembered him quite clearly.

You said, I know I loved him and he loved me. 

He used to send you from his home on Bank Street in New London to the store down the block that sold frozen chocolate pops. One for him and one for me, you said. You said, How I loved that!

He died when you were six or eight. Tumor on the brain. He was in Maine much of the time, you said, directing operations at the quarries at Port Clyde. But you remembered being there. A quiet community, you said, with a large boarding house for your grandfather and the workers. You recalled the woman who ran the house. Lizzie. She cooked over a very large pot-bellied stove.

You wrote, “I remember sitting . . .”

The note continues, as many of your notes did, onto another loose page folded into the center, thoughtfully numbered so as to not confuse me. I have some of them, but here the pages are lost. 

I went through all the notebooks and letters I could find. Hundreds of letters. Dozens of journals. There are notes-to-self and cutouts from newspapers and nonprofit mailers. A note on scratch paper fell into my lap: “What did I do with my grandfather Booth’s letters?” Just the thought of a file like that sends a prickle down my back.

One series of notebooks is written directly to me. But somehow the volume from my middle grade years, the years around when Mom and Dad split, is missing like a tooth. I’ve dug around but nothing’s turned up.

LK and I drive downeast to Mount Desert Island. It’s our one-year anniversary. Long before our son is born. We rent a cabin near the Acadia access road and eat pizza on a farm that looks out at a meadow with gardens and spotted cows.

We find the granite museum without trouble, though it appears more like a homestead than a tourist stop. I knock, and Steven Haynes greets us excitedly. He says we should look around. The walls are lined with folding tables and bulletins and pegboards. Photographs and maps. Earth science charts. Stone picks. Axes and hammers. Invoices from this granite company and that one. 

I mention our family’s history, all the stories, and Haynes says we’ll get to that, that we should start the tour so we could talk about the good stuff. Haynes takes us back to prehistory for a geology lesson I only half follow.

There was a super volcano, he says. That much I hear. It might have been among the largest blasts in the history of the world. Blew right sky high, he says. The layers of lava there are in places as much as a quarter mile thick.

The Cadillac Mountain granite, he says, is unique among the Maine granite because of its unique blend of feldspar, iron, gabbro, and hornblende. That color.

The Otter Creek quarries were the first, Haynes says. Cyrus Hall from Belfast, Maine, who came in his two-masted schooner Puritan, was the first to move granite off the coast. He traveled downeast to the tip of Mount Desert Island and saw the pinks and reds in the Otter Creek granite. With this stone, he knew, he’d make his fortune. 

Hall stripped off the trees and soil, Haynes says. Found that Mother Nature split the granite into sheeting, where the granite breaks most easily. And he broke off samples. Sent them all across the land. 

When I first mentioned the quarries to a teacher and included some vague details in a story, he said that was my subject. That it couldn’t be avoided. That it was a novel, no doubt about it. I’ve accumulated hundreds of thousands of words in dozens of files. Scenes, mostly. Notes to self. Outlines. But what happens always is that I discover something new, something true. 

Or some artifact surfaces:

I’m in an ephemera shop in Camden. Art books and maps. Files of documents. I ask if there’s anything related to granite in the stacks. The woman behind the counter says she thinks she saw something last week. She shows me to a rack of files. She says, I swear it was here. Here, she says, here. Look at this. And sure enough it’s memo. From the office of the Booth Brothers. Proprietors of the Connecticut Granite Quarry.

Dated November 1, 1887, the note indicates it had accompanied a $20 check, which was paid, apparently, to the harbormaster in New London. A schooner had been cited. It doesn’t say for what. But it does say this: This fine I pay in protest.

And then it’s signed: Wm. Booth.

There’s enough here, enough in the letters, in the journals, in the stories I remember, in the late night searches and newspaper archives, for me to piece something together. Something I could have shared with you and you would have approved. Something to which you might have said, Yes, dear heart, you rascal, you got it absolutely right. Even if I didn’t. Surely there’s gaps you could have filled in twenty or thirty years ago. Before your memory turned to fog. Surely you would have things to say about presumptions or leaps I’ve made. But I like to think most of it’s right. 

In a fiction drawn from a life there’s that pull between what happened and what didn’t in the name of making something with urgency, causality, and drive. But this is about you. About others, too, but it seems correct for this to be written as if it were true. As a letter back to you. At least now. Maybe there’s still a novel in here. Somewhere. But for now this will do.

With the Switts, we found the Vinalhaven quarry on a map. You noted it was named after your mother’s family. On the way, you said, was a relic of relics. The Galamander. A massive wagon used with a team of horses to move stone across land. Some said it was first built here in Hannock County and was specific to the 19th-century quarries up and down the coast. Others said it was a joke to think Yankees invented a machine that obviously dated to Greek and Roman antiquity.

What made the Galamanders special were their twelve-foot rear wheels and a derrick boom fastened to the same rear axle. Quarrymen rigged to it a stone block, which hung suspended behind it, and then a mush team of eight or ten horses hauled it away to the schooners where it was loaded and sent to sea.

Will Switt pulled off and cut the engine. The Galamander was beneath a pavilion. Its wheels were three times my size. Like looking up to the roof of a house. The boom was folded down. I climbed between the spokes. You or Pa took my picture. 

All the Galamanders were painted the same color. Elder Littlefield Blue. Something like cornflower or cadet, but different.

And just like that we were off again. East on Pequot Avenue to the Booth quarry. It was a swim spot, you said. Summer kids spent their days camped on the ledge. We parked by a little trailhead and I slipped my trunks on under a towel. Along the rim were groups of big kids, high schoolers with coolers and camp chairs set out in the sun. You said not to dive, and before I went I should come see something at the quarry’s side. There in the stone was carved a ship, the simple outline of a three-master. The William Booth, you said. Your great grandfather, come over from Scotland, the man who ran the quarries up and down the coast. The schooner was his namesake. 

Built in Mystic, rigged in New London, and launched in March of 1903, the William Booth promptly got stuck in the mud and required a tug to fully launch. 

In 1906 she ran aground on a mud bar in the Saco River. She was hauling coal, 800 tons to Philadelphia, and was on her way home. Empty, floating high but not high enough. The tugboat Joseph Baker, attempting to nudge her free, struck a rock, took on water fast and cold, and sank. 

In August of 1916 the Booth was docked at Lewes, Delaware, under the captaincy of an E.T. Greenleaf. That’s Edward Taylor. A distant cousin. You shared a great grandfather Greenleaf. That’s your father’s name. And Booth is your mother’s name. So a cousin on one side was captaining a coasting schooner owned by and named after a great-grandfather on the other, fourteen years before you were born. 

I wonder if you knew that. 

One of captain Greenleaf’s hands, Ralph Matthews, twenty-one years old, likely from Boothbay, Maine, fell ill with infantile paralysis. He had, captain Greenleaf said, swam in the Schuylkill River earlier in the week, and the treating physician said it was likely he contracted his sickness there. Matthews died in a few days. They isolated the ship and crew. 

In March of 1921, bound from Vinalhaven to New York with a full load of coal, she ran aground on Great Ledge, just off Woods Hole. Captain Greenleaf noted she was undamaged and, with the Coast Guard’s OK, let her sit until a full-moon high tide and was successfully floated several days later. 

In June of 1925, the Booth’s mainmast snapped five miles west of Vineyard Sound. She was in distress until a tug towed her into Newport. 

And she finally sank for good in April 1928. It was a clear and almost calm night when the four master Helen Barnet Gring rammed her at anchor, plowing right through the hull, ripping the Booth nearly in two. This was a couple years before you were born. The Gring was left leaking and without a bowsprit. The Booth sank in three minutes with a hull full of paving stone. 

We stood there silent at the quarry. I made my way to the edge. I was seven years old. I didn’t think about a schooner running aground or what it meant for a tug to sink in the midst of a rescue. I didn’t think about what it meant to contract polio after taking a dip in a seemingly benign body of water. I didn’t think about what it meant be quarantined from the world out there. I didn’t think about what it meant for tons and tons of paving blocks to be left to rot off Cape Cod. I felt the stone beneath me and the warm sun from above, and then I leapt into the cool August blue.