Gallery Talk: Thursday, September 4, 2014, 7:00 PM, Barrington Library Auditorium:
Master Shipwright Clark Poston on Restoring Wooden Boats
Clark Poston will describe the process for restoring classic, wooden boats at a lecture on Thursday, September 4 at 7 PM in the Barrington Library auditorium.
Poston trained for seven years at the Mystic Seaport Museum with renowned boat builder John Gardner and then spent two years building and restoring wooden boats on Martha’s Vineyard at Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway before going to Europe as the lead shipwright on the archival restoration of Avel, an 1896 C. E. Nicholson cutter.
Poston then founded the John Gardner School of Boatbuilding in Annapolis, MD before joining the International Yacht Restoration School staff in 1998.
At IYRS, Poston played a key role in the design, development and roll out of three federally-accredited career training programs: a two-year program in wooden yacht restoration, a six-month marine systems program, and a new six-month program in composites technology. He is also responsible for maintaining the important relationship between the school and its industry partners.
The lecture is sponsored by the Barrington Preservation Society and complements its recently opened exhibit: Barrington Ship to Shore. Poston’s talk is free and open to the public.
• ca. 1763 Joseph Allen, Jr. House, 153 George Street, on Nockum Hill, recently named to the National Register of Historic Places. Owners: Jason and Christine Lawrence.
Barrington, R.I., is often thought of as a quiet residential town with historic waterfront mansions and substantial suburban estates.
Like the rest of the east side of Narragansett Bay, Barrington in the 1600s was the home of Wampanoag Indians, who lived by farming, hunting, oystering, and fishing. It was they who taught the first Pilgrim colonists at Plymouth to plant Indian corn and other vegetables.
In 2013, Historic Preservation professors and students from Roger Williams University in Bristol examined Barrington public land, probate, and tax records to see what other industries had developed by the mid-19th century. They discovered that Barrington, in contrast to the neighboring seafaring towns of Warren and Bristol, remained organized around farming as the primary industry.
The mid-19th century saw the beginnings of Barrington’s own industrial revolution. A tidepowered grain mill had operated from 1798 on, but later factories all ran by steam power. The Nayatt Brick Company established a large brickmaking complex in 1847 at clay pits in the middle of town. After the railroad was built in 1855, the company became the town’s major manufacturer. The Mouscochuck Creek was developed as a canal to float Barrington bricks on barges to Narragansett Bay, where tugboats towed them to other destinations. Barrington brick structures include Barrington’s St. John’s Church and Leander Peck School (Barrington Public Library); the Providence Biltmore Hotel, the Providence railway station, Brown University’s John Hay Library, and decorative sidewalks in Providence and as far away as Wilmington, Delaware.
In the 18th century, Barrington women were producing linen and wool cloth as a home industry. It was not until 1897 that the town’s first textile factory opened in West Barrington. It became O’Bannon Mills in the early 20th century, manufacturing imitation leather mostly for the automobile industry. Later, the mill manufactured worsted yarns and cotton shirtings. The building still stands in Bay Spring, transformed into an apartment complex for seniors.