06/04/2026
THROWBACK THURSDAY by Sharon Cummins
The Talented Clark Family
The four-masted schooner Savannah, built for Captain William H. Gould in 1901, was the last vessel Shipbuilder David Clark worked on before his death that year. His nephew, George H. Clark, son of David’s talented black sheep brother Abner, was foreman at Clark’s Kennebunkport shipyard.
The Kennebunkport shipbuilding industry went on hiatus with the death of David Clark but George H. Clark was not without employment. He was already a well-respected house carpenter and contractor. Among his important large contracts were the construction of the Sagamore Hotel at Kennebunk Beach, (1896) Old Fort Inn, (1902) Breakwater Court, (1914) and Booth Tarkington’s Seawood (1917).
Also in 1917, Kennebunkport hotelier Reuel W. Norton, one-time owner of the Old Fort Inn and Breakwater Court, proposed to form a shipbuilding partnership with George H. Clark to revive the shipbuilding industry in Kennebunkport. They would build a schooner for use in World War I like the ones George’s uncle used to build in the very same Kennebunkport shipyard property where the Savannah was built.
Norton & Clark laid a keel molded after David Clark’s famous schooner Golden Ball on June 1,1917. She was 143 feet long, 30 foot beam, and has a gross tonnage of 350 odd tons. She was intended for coastwise trade. A force of 25 men was employed in building her for the estimated cost of $70,000.
The Clark-built schooner still didn’t have a name when she was launched in March of 1918. According to an account published in the Kennebunk Enterprise a few days later, “The schooner slid down the ways quickly and without a hitch, while the spectators, numbering several hundred, stood at every place of advantage, watching it as it plunged into the water just above the bridge.”
She was towed to Gloucester, Mass., to be rigged and named the Edmund A. Billings but with World War I coming to an end, the demand for ships subsided. She was sold to New York parties in 1919 and renamed Mathilde. By 1920, she was sailing under the Portuguese flag.
