Fishing Schooner L.A. Dunton

Built at the Arthur D. Story Yard in Essex, Massachusetts, in 1921, the fishing schooner L.A. Dunton represented the height of development among the Northeast’s all-sail ocean fishing vessels before draggers made them obsolete. Designed by Thomas McManus and owned and commanded by Captain Felix J. Hogan from 1921 to 1934, she made about 18 trips a year from Georges Bank off Cape Cod to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Fishing with hooks and lines handled by dorymen, she combined speed, maneuverability, and stability, catching mostly halibut in summer and haddock in winter, preserving the catch on ice for the return to Boston, then the nation’s principal fish market, while cod was commonly delivered to Gloucester to be salted and dried for distant markets. After retiring from fishing during the Great Depression, she was sold to new owners in Newfoundland, converted into an engine-powered vessel with shortened masts and a pilothouse, and fished the Grand Banks for another 20 years before becoming a coastal freighter in 1955 and being purchased for preservation by Mystic Seaport in 1963.

Mystic, Connecticut · United States