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The third of only ten six-masters built, the Addie M. Lawrence was launched at the Percy & Small yard in Bath, Maine in 1902, the second of the seven giant six-masters they were to build.
Constructed as coal carriers,. the wooden ships were designed to give the new-fangled steamers a run for their money. For they could load faster and were cheaper per ton to build and operate than any other ship. The ships were mastered by hard driving shippers, too, who earned profits for the company by loading on the heaviest possible cargoes and sailing in all weather. Captain Crowley of the George W. Wells once observed that the "most joyful sound I ever heard was when the pumps sucked [air] coming across Massachusetts Bay in the Wells with fifty four hundred tons of coal in the teeth of a Nor'wester."
While the ship was massive by any standards it was, at 2807 tons the smallest of the seven ships - with the largest being the mighty 3730 ton Wyoming. Built for the J.S. Winslow fleet of coal carriers, the Addie M. was named for the daughter of Edward J. Lawrence, brother of the late president of National Carbon, Washington H. Lawrence. The ships were built due to a shortage of coal carriers to transport coal from the Southern coal fields to the New England cotton mills - a shortage so severe that in the fall of 1899 one of the mills, Sanford's Goodale mill, was burning 200 cords (2,400 steres) of wood a day as a replacement to power the steam plant.
The disadvantage of the six-masters ships was that they hogged excessively. John Wardwell designer of the six-master George W. Wells once wrote that "six-masters were not practical. They were too long for wooden construction and when loaded with coal became badly strained by overlapping [overhanging] the beds on which they rested at low tide, while discharging cargo." To offset the visual effect of hogging (which was over three feet - 1 m - in some cases) the schooners were built with curved keels and exaggerated sheers that gently flattened out as hogging took place.
During the First World War the Addie M. Lawrence hauled cargoes of munitions and war material to Europe. Unlike many of her wooden brethren, the Addie managed to elude the U-boats - only to sink in a storm off France in 1917.
These ships were commissioned by a gentleman in Bermuda whose grandfather, Captain Ellis Haskell, was one of her masters. One ship was built under full sail; the other on a rough sea with top staysails housed. One of the ships was a gift to his sister at Christmas.
model ship photos & text © D.S. Smith 2003
Sister Ship Edward Winslow 
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