For about a century and a half, the upper Damariscotta River was a center of wooden sailing-vessel construction, supported by nearby forests of ash, pine, spruce, and hackmatack. From the mid 18th century until the early 20th century, more than 30 shipyards in Damariscotta, Newcastle, Nobleboro, and along the Bristol northern line launched well over 400 vessels, from small sloops to clipper ships, brigs, barks, and schooners. These ships served both US coasts and foreign ports in the West Indies, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Far East, carrying cargoes such as coal, lumber, cotton fabrics, blankets, buttons, window glass, iron tools, utensils, salt, molasses, spices, and people. Several early shipyards stood on Great Salt Bay, and the first known shipbuilders on the river, George Barstow and Nathaniel Byant, arrived in 1765; Bryant built a couple of sloops before his death in 1772, and both yards existed before the Revolution. Later vessels ranged from under 100 tons to more than 2,000 tons, including the 2,135-ton Ocean Herald, built by Col. Cyrus Cotter at what is now Belknap's Point in Damariscotta, later sold to France during the Crimean War as the Malabar, portrayed by François Roux in a painting now in the Louvre, and eventually abandoned at sea in March 1862. Other notable ships included the Elwell, a Downeaster built at the Elbridge Norris Yard by Eben Haggett and regarded by many as the fastest ship in the Pacific, setting in 1896 an unequaled seventeen-day round-trip speed record between San Francisco and Vancouver Island; the Success, one of the large vessels built in the 1850s by Joseph Day Jr., whose master, Captain Chase, drove her under full canvas down an ice-coated river after her November 1857 launching; the Wiscasset, first fitted as a whaler and later refitted for trans-Atlantic passenger and cargo service, which brought the twelve-year-old Andrew Carnegie to America on a rough fifty-day voyage; the Charlie and Willie, a schooner built in 1849 at the Norris-Metcalf Yard that was still afloat in Boston Harbor after seventy-one years; the Black Warrior, a three-decked clipper built in 1853 in Algernon Austin's Yard that later sailed to ports including New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Valparaiso, Melbourne, and Port Philip before ending her days in Melbourne Harbor after 24 years of service; the Golden Rule, built in 1854 by William Hitchcock and Co. and still in the Customs Registry in 1900 at age 46; and the Mary H. Diebold, a five-masted schooner launched in 1920 by Richard Diebold, the last builder of wooden sailing vessels on the river. Shipbuilding declined during Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the depression before it, but flourished until steam power and railroads reduced the trade, after which only a few yards remained, including the Morse Yard, later the Marr Yard, in Damariscotta through the World War II period, while the Bryants of Newcastle carried on the tradition.