For more than 20 years I've sat on a bench, crawled on a sail loft floor, sewed on a machine, put coal in a cookstove, sat at a dinner table, and soaked in a tub; all former possessions of an old sailmaker and his step daughter who lived and worked together here in this house and shop on Limerock Street in Camden Maine.

Never ones to throw anything away, Amos P. Lord and Jessie Reynolds left the countless small material things, bits and pieces of no great value, that swept together to form for me a palpable sense of another day.

I met Jessie when I was 22, in the summer of 1976. We worked out an arrangement where I would rent the small sail loft upstairs in the barn connected to the house for fifty dollars a month. As she was then 80 years old, I was available for various chores and errands, a service that would occasionally extend out to her old friends in the neighborhood (another story altogether). Many times at the end of my work day I would visit for a few minutes before heading home, and these are the times I would hear the stories of her life,and that of the sailmaker A.P. Lord.

Jessies mother, Lizzie Perkins, married Amos in 1906. It was a second marrage for both of them, and Jessie would have been 10. Since at least the time of the tent factory during world war one, Jessie had helped Amos stitch and fabricate, and they continued to work and live together until Amos P. Lord died in 1957. Jessie then married for the first time at 60 years of age. She and her new husband Kenneth Reynolds operated the Limerock Street business for about 10 years under the name of Jessie's Canvas Shop.

Jessie died in 1981, and I bought the house and shop and all the contents from the remaining relatives. If it wasn't for the scattered collection of hand tools and machinery, receipt books and remnants of materials and hardware, my interest in this sailmakers story would have faded. In spite of the occasionally routine and sometimes less than romantic perspective I now have about my chosen "trade", I will often still be inspired by my simple association with the tools that were used by a sailmaker100 years before me. This small effort is my way of expressing an appreciation of the sailmaker who I never knew, with fond memories of his step daughter Jessie, who introduced me to all his wonderful“stuff”.

This is a work in progress. Please come back and visit this site again, as I intend to fill it out with any new information I may come across, and more clearly document what I already have.

Grant Gambell
April 2004

Amos Perkins Lord was among the last of the sailmakers to the Schooners, yachts and small craft that were at work around the turn of the 19th century on the coast of Maine.A.P.Lords’ life as a sailmaker spanned the very last years of dependance on commercial sail power. At the time of his apprenticeship in the 1880's, sail had by no means given over to steam. On the coast of Maine, the value from skilled workers in communities long accustomed to shipbuilding made the construction of larger and ever more powerful sailing vessels cost effective when compared tonnage to tonnage to steam. Many sailing vessels kept busy moving materials of all sorts, both long haul and short haul. As an example of this, the Rockport-Rockland Lime Company alone at the end of the 19th century owned 150 schooners, transporting casks of lime for mortar and plaster to Boston and beyond. At the end of Mr. Lord's life however, less than a dozen working schooners remained active in Penobscot Bay, carrying vacationing passengers in Capt. Frank Swifts patched up fleet of old work horses.

Capt. Swifts Eva S. Cullison and Enterprise