A visitor to Thorne’s Bend today would see a town boat launch, a picnic area with a few benches, and a granite marker erected in 1953 that reads simply: “Thorne & Sons Shipworks, 1803-1882. Here were built river sloops that carried the commerce of Aroostook County to the sea.”
There is no shipyard. There is no dry dock. The deep pool that Ezra Thorne chose for launching vessels was filled in and planted over. And yet, this unlikely spot — seventy-two miles inland as the crow flies — was once the heart of a maritime industry that employed over 130 men and launched 47 known vessels.
“It seems improbable, I know,” says Jed Thorne, the town historian and great-great-grandson of Ezra. “But you have to understand the economics of the time. In 1803, there were no roads in northern Maine — not real ones, anyway. The rivers were the highways. And if you wanted to move lumber from the interior to the coast, you needed boats that could navigate those rivers.”
The boats that Thorne & Sons built were river sloops and shallops: shallow-draft vessels designed for the narrow, winding waterways that connected the interior to the Penobscot River and, ultimately, to the Atlantic. They were not glamorous ships, but they were essential — the trucks of their era.
The shipyard’s decline was as swift as its rise. The Bangor & Aroostook Railroad arrived in 1884, and within a decade, river shipping was effectively obsolete. The last vessel, the 68-foot sloop Lydia Barnes, was launched in 1882. She carried freight for fourteen more years before being wrecked off Matinicus Island in 1896.
Today, the most visible remnant of that era is not at Thorne’s Bend at all, but at The Dry Dock restaurant, which occupies the renovated boat shed where the ships were finished. The restaurant’s exposed beams — hewn from timber felled in 1802 — are a direct link to the yard’s founding.
“People ask me if I miss the shipbuilding days,” says Dean Moreau, the restaurant’s owner. “I tell them I wasn’t there for the shipbuilding days. But the building was. And I think it remembers.”