42 2 HIS TOR Y OF COHA SSE T. 



the two-masted, square-rigged type called brigs. They 

 even had to venture beyond the local demand and they 

 topk contracts for Boston owners and for others. Besides 

 Jonathan B. Bates there were several other master car- 

 penters of that period, including James Stoddard and Isaac 

 Hall. 



In the year 1841, the largest undertaking up to that 

 time, the bark Lewis was launched. This was the first 

 one to sport three masts, and being a 218-ton merchant 

 vessel, it was not a small enterprise for the owners. But 

 the largest of all vessels launched into our harbor by 

 Cohasset carpenters is said to have been the Greenwich 

 in the year 1850. 



She was over three times the size of the bark Lewis, 

 measuring 788 tons and having two decks instead of one, 

 as the schooners had. She was one hundred and sixty 

 feet long, so that when she slid off the ways from the 

 Barrett place she stretched nearly the whole distance 

 across our little Cove. Her three masts were rigged with 

 square sails, so she was called a "ship." Many who are 

 living to-day remember the Greenwich, and her prestige 

 is the more clear because so few vessels have been built 

 since then. 



Two other ships, the Tagus and the Hellespont, both 

 of smaller size, are said to have come from the same yard ; 

 but the time of building ocean carriers, of making sails, 

 of twisting ropes,* and of rigging the spars of these ves- 

 sels is wholly and forever past. 



One of the last of the shipbuilding efforts was in 1872, 

 when the trim little pleasure schooner Gracie (fifty-four 

 tons) was built at an expense of some twenty thousand dol- 

 lars for Edward E. Tower. She has floated a dozen years 

 or more at our harbor stripped of her rigging, and is slowly 

 rotting away, to become as all the others — vanished. 



* There is said to have been a long ropewalk on Bassing Beach for the manu- 

 facture of ropes used in rigging our vessels. 



