Breaking barn: Pete Seeger helps sloop, museum celebrate

Linda Richards, Rick Nestler, Josh Gordon and Rick Palieri entertained the crowd. (Photo by Phyllis McCabe)

HRMM board member and former director Russell Lange said the vision for “River Port” started eight years ago with brainstorming by him and others connected with the museum and a sketch that showed a tall-masted ship, which everyone later realized might be the sloop Clearwater. New walkways, lighting, a model steamship for educating kids, and other improvements are the fruits of that initial vision, Lange said, but establishing the winter berth for Clearwater marks the start of a new era. The sloop “helps put this place on a bigger map.” The next step is turning the museum into a green building that will be open year round, which would enable it to better accommodate school groups, he said. (Currently the museum is open from May through October.)

Also present was Mayor Shayne Gallo, who thanked the Clearwater for investing in Kingston and said the partnership between the two organizations was a model in these hard times. “Working together for one common purpose is what we have to do to sustain our community and make it grow,” he said.

Fran Dunwell, coordinator of the Hudson River Estuary Program at the state Department of Conservation, put in a good word for River Day, which was an outgrowth of the 2009’s quadricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s 1609 arrival. This year, the celebration was marked by 40 events up and down the river, including the Newburgh-to-Beacon swim. “It’s a great opportunity to celebrate the progress made in cleaning up the water,” she said, adding that River Day would continue to grow, with 80 events planned for 2013.

A boat is born

Seeger said he and his 90-year-old wife, Toshi-Aline — he noted the couple, who live in Beacon, had celebrated their 69th anniversary the day before — don’t travel much anymore but drove with their daughter to Kingston because they “wanted to see this project off to a flying start.” He recalled that late one evening many years ago, while reading Sloops of the Hudson by William E. Verplanck and Moses W. Collyer, he got the idea to build a replica ship and contacted a few friends. They started the organization and hired Cyrus Hamlin, a shipbuilder in Maine, to construct the boat, which he did “for a very low price.”

Hamlin found some plans and also used a period painting of the Hudson River sloop Buttersworth as a reference, said Seeger. The ship took three years to build and was launched in 1969.  Seeger sailed the ship up and down the Hudson, stopping at ports every 25 miles and putting on performances by musicians.

He said the Coast Guard required the ship to have a licensed captain and six trained crew members. It also is slightly smaller than the originals: because no modern-day captain had the skills of the sailing captains of old, “they cut us down,” Seeger said. “They cut down the mast by eight feet and took six feet off the bowsprit.” Seeger said he hoped the Clearwater “keeps sailing through the centuries,” citing the example of “Old Ironsides” — the 1797-built USS Constitution, which still sails in Boston Harbor, as an example of ship longevity.

While performing briefly under the gazebo with Nestler, Seeger praised the arts as being the key to educating kids, promoting peace and forging an appreciation of our history, culture, and environment so that they can be preserved in the future. “All over the world, people are using the arts to bring us together,” he said. “Maybe here it’s the woodworking arts, where kids build boats and boats build kids.”