Hampton Boats
Dear Editors,
I enjoyed Stan Grayson’s article on Hampton boats, which included quoted reports about these boats in early Motorboat magazines. One important bit he didn’t use but that could be pointed out to readers is the letter that David Perry Sinnett had published in the June 10, 1908 Motorboat. He notes that he was responsible for the first Casco Bay strip-built boat, and includes details of the 1877 build. By the time he wrote his letter, he had built 175 square-sterned, strip-built boats. He figured there were 300 of them, all motorized, by then in use on Casco Bay. “Five years ago,” he wrote, “there was only one motorboat in the bay, and now there is only one sailboat…. On the fourth of last April a 24′-boat equipped with a 5½-hp motor went out to the fishing grounds from the island fifteen miles to the leeward. Shortly after the boat reached the grounds it began to blow hard, developing into a forty-mile-an-hour northwesterly gale. This boat made the run home, against the wind in two hours and forty minutes.” The implication, of course, was that the sailboats would have had a tough time, with losses. Sinnett notes that the boats were 16′ to 32′ with a price of from $5 to $12.
There is also a great full-page illustration of these boats in the magazine’s April 10, 1908 edition. Besides the photo that you republished, there are some great ones of ice-covered Hamptons in the collection of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. Readers might also be interested to know that the museum has in its collection KINGFISHER, a Sinnett-built motorized Hampton. Mystic Seaport Museum also has one—a pleasure boat that Sinnett built in 1902.
American Neptune, APRIL 1943
A classic square-sterned Hampton boat (see WB No. 295).