WILLOW CREEK — For the past fourteen months, the back room of the Willow Creek Post Office has been the site of a secret project: a meticulously detailed scale model of the Lydia Barnes, the last sloop launched from Thorne & Sons Shipworks.
The model was built by Martin Croft, 63, who has been the town’s postmaster for forty years and, in his spare time, one of the most accomplished amateur ship modelers in northern Maine. The finished model — three feet long, built to a scale of 1:32, with every plank and spar hand-carved from basswood — will be donated to the Willow Creek Historical Society.
“I started it because I was tired of seeing that old photograph in Lydia Barnes’s house and thinking, ‘That’s all we’ve got,’” Croft says, standing at the post office counter where he has served three generations of Willow Creek residents. “We needed something three-dimensional. Something you could walk around and see from every angle.”
Croft’s source material was limited: the sepia photograph in Lydia Barnes’s possession, the ship’s registry records at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, and a set of annotated drawings that Town Historian Jed Thorne found in his grandfather’s papers. From these fragments, Croft reconstructed the vessel’s lines, hull shape, and rigging with painstaking precision.
“It’s not exact — I had to make some educated guesses about the rigging,” Croft admits. “But it’s as close as anyone is going to get, given that the actual ship has been at the bottom of the Atlantic for 130 years.”
The model will be officially presented to the historical society at a ceremony on June 15 at the Carnegie Library. Lydia Barnes, the ship’s namesake and the town’s oldest resident, has been invited to cut the ribbon.
“Eighty-two years old, never seen the ship that my mother named me after,” Barnes said when informed of the project. “I think it’s about time I got a look at her.”