The Shipbuilders of Essex

Renowned as the creators of New England's great fishing schooners, the shipbuilders of Essex, Massachusetts, have a 300-year history that is, as the subtitle of this impressive book attests, "a chronicle of Yankee endeavor." This book documents in text, appendices, photos and other illustrations the rise of the trade from 1634 to its glory days in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and its decline in the first four decades of this century. Dana Story, author of Growing Up in a Shipyard, has a well-deserved reputation for thorough historical research and for the ease and wit of his writing. Here he brings these qualities to a book that is in large part his own family's history. His forebears settled in Essex in 1637 and began building vessels in 1813.