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April 1, 2021

Lincolnville boatbuilders to restore 1928 NJ oyster schooner

By Laurie Schreiber
Courtesy / Clark & Eisele, Bayshore Center at Bivalve
Lincolnville boatbuilding firm Clark & Eisele plans to restore the 1928 Delaware Bay oyster schooner on Belfast’s waterfront starting in September.

A Lincolnville boatbuilding company plans to restore a near-century-old oyster schooner on grounds the company will lease from the city of Belfast this fall.

The Belfast City Council recently agreed to lease a portion of city-owned waterfront land to Clark & Eisele Traditional Boatbuilding, which plans to restore the AJ Meerwald, an 85-foot schooner built in 1928 on the Maurice River in southern New Jersey. 

Today the Meerwald, New Jersey's official tall ship and a classic example of a Delaware Bay oyster schooner, remains on the Maurice River (which locally is pronounced "Morris"). The ship works as an educational platform, hosting school groups and visitors at the Bayshore Center at Bivalve, an environmental history museum in Point Norris, N.J.

The boatbuilding firm is owned by Garett Eisele and Tim Clark.

Eisele told the council the Meerwald at one time was owned by a well-to-do fishing family. The oyster resource where it operated was devastated by blight in the 1950s, which put hundreds of oyster schooners out of business and collapsed the fishery, he said.

In the 1980s, he explained, the schooner was acquired for a dollar by the founder of the Bayshore Center at Bivalve. The Meerwald then underwent a complete rebuild in 1991.

Courtesy / Clark & Eisele
Garett Eisele is seen here working on a restoration.

“It’s time again. It’s been 30 years,” he continued. “Generally speaking, she’s been pretty well take care of and was well rebuilt.”

Maine is one of the last bastions of traditional wooden boatbuilding and restoration firms like his, he added.

“We still have that tradition,” he said.

The job has cultural significance to Maine because the state has its own fleet of traditional schooners that have been repurposed as passenger vessels, and has long been the go-to for traditional boat restorations, he said.

The company offers traditional and historic boat and shipbuilding, repair and restoration. Eisele said he expects that five to nine people will be working on the project.

Clark and Eisele have done work for the museum over the past few years. In 2018, they spent about month there to address some of the Meerwald’s more pressing issues, including rebuilding its wheelbox, replacing some problematic planking, replacing a quarter bit and several other items, according to the company’s website.

Their vessel evaluations have been used to apply for and receive a large grant from the state of New Jersey for the restoration of the vessel. 

The city-owned waterfront acreage is known as Belfast Yards and neighbors Front Street Shipyard. The lease would begin Sept. 1 and extend to June 1, 2022, with an optional extension for up to three months in the event of delay. 

Clark and Eisele plan to build a 32-foot by 100-foot temporary shelter to house the project. Temporary power would be run from Front Street Shipyard, which will also haul out the vessel when it arrives and relaunch it when the job is done.

“It’s the very definition of a working waterfront,” said Belfast’s mayor, Eric Sanders.

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