Piecing Together a Sailmaking Life
For more than 40 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 the sailmaker Amos P. Lord and his step daughter Jessie Reynolds, who lived and worked together here in this house and shop on Limerock Street in Camden, Maine.
I met Jessie when I was 22 in the summer of 1976. Aspiring, enthusiastic, and inexperienced, I had worked out an arrangement where I would rent the small sail loft upstairs in the barn connected to her house for fifty dollars a month, and begin a business of my own. As she was then 80 years old, I was often on hand 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 with Jessie 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.
Jessie’s mother, Lizzie Perkins, married Amos in 1906. It was a second marriage for both of them, and Jessie would have been ten. Since at least a period during the first World War, Jessie, who became a skilled fabricator in her own right, had helped Amos in his busy military tent factory. After Lizzie's death, they continued to work and live together until Amos 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 ten years under the name of Jessie's Canvas Shop.
Jessie died in 1981, and I bought the house, shop and all the contents from the remaining relatives. If it wasn't for the scattered collection of furniture, hand tools, machinery, receipt books and remnants of materials and hardware, my interest in these sailmaker's stories would have faded. My life and times are of course much different from A.P. Lords, but my simple and daily association with the tools that were used by a sailmaker one hundred years before me continued to inspire.
In fact, inspired as I was, I remained here long enough to become an old sailmaker myself. After my long time business partner Brad Hunter retired, I had the opportunity to train and work with a couple of young aspiring sailmakers, one of which has now taken over Gambell and Hunter Sailmakers. Jenny Baxter has moved the company to a new location in the town of Rockport, just a few minutes away. She and her crew will continue to service the "windjammers" that have been such a critical part of our work, and that of A.P. Lord's before.
This project has been a way of expressing my appreciation for the sailmaker who I never knew, with fond memories of his step daughter Jessie, who introduced me to all his wonderful “stuff”.
Grant Gambell
October 2023
