The largest wooden sailing vessel ever built in the United States slid into the Kennebec River from a yard that is still standing. The six-masted schooner Wyoming, launched by Percy & Small in 1909, measured 329 feet along the deck.
That berth now sits inside the 20-acre campus of Maine Maritime Museum at 243 Washington Street, the shorefront from which lighthouse boat tour bath maine tours set out. Percy & Small is the only intact shipyard in the country that once built large wooden sailing vessels.
Bath has earned its old name, City of Ships. More than 5,000 vessels have been launched from the town since 1743, and the Kennebec once carried ice, granite, and lumber downriver in the same traffic. Bath Iron Works, founded in 1884, still lays down destroyers upriver from the museum pier, and its cranes rank among the more conspicuous Midcoast Maine landmarks visible from the channel. The museum opened in 1962 as the Bath Marine Museum and took over the shipyard property in the 1970s, preserving five original buildings: the mill and joiner shop, the mould loft, the paint and treenail shop, the pitch oven, and the caulkers' shed.
The river's light stations are the second half of the story, and the reason a Kennebec River lighthouse cruise runs at all. Four of them — Doubling Point, Squirrel Point, Perkins Island, and the Doubling Point Range Lights — were built in a single federal push in 1898, when Bath's launches had made the river a crowded commercial channel. Downriver, Pond Island Light marks the mouth. Two miles beyond it, Seguin Island Light was authorized by George Washington and first lit in 1795; its 1857 granite tower holds the only first-order Fresnel lens still in service in Maine. Fort Popham's unfinished granite crescent guards the eastern shore.
What survives here is unusually complete. The collection runs past 20,000 objects — half-hull models, Sewall family shipping papers, navigational instruments, and the 1850s Donnell House, home to the family whose yard preceded Percy & Small. Boatbuilders still cut planking on site, and the fleet includes small working craft rather than static hulls. A steel sculpture on the lawn outlines Wyoming at full length, 450 feet from jibboom to spanker, a ghost drawn in girders. For visitors, a lighthouse boat tour bath maine tour is less a sightseeing loop than a reading of the same industrial river the shipwrights knew.
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