Cape Cod sailboats: a Wareham, Massachusetts yard built on other architects' lines
Cape Cod Shipbuilding has never been a design house. From its earliest wooden boats to its long run of fiberglass one-designs, the Wareham, Massachusetts yard built to plans purchased or licensed from outside naval architects — Charles Gurney, Philip Rhodes, Sparkman & Stephens, the Herreshoffs, W. Starling Burgess, Charles Wittholz, Uffa Fox — while credit for each hull stayed with its own designer. One thing ran through the whole span: the yard itself, passed into the Goodwin family's hands in 1939.
Origins and ownership
The company traces to roughly 1885, when brothers Myron and Charles Gurney were manufacturing wagons, carriages, and wagon wheels for Tremont Nail and other Wareham firms. In 1899 they turned the business toward boats as Cape Cod Power Dory Co.; Charles handled the drafting and design himself, including the 1925 Cape Cod Knockabout, an 18-foot one-design that became the most famous of the Gurney brothers' boats. A 1919 bridge project cut off the original site, so the yard moved to its present 7 Narrows Road location, with 1,500 feet of water frontage, and was renamed Cape Cod Shipbuilding Corp., building wooden pleasure and commercial boats, including Coast Guard craft, through this era.
Around 1935, after Charles Gurney's death, the yard passed to G.S. Williams, and in 1938 it was reorganized and incorporated as Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. The following year brought the anecdote that shaped the yard's modern history: E.L. Goodwin, then president of New Jersey's Undercliff Boatworks and a dealer for Cape Cod boats, came to complain about a decline in build quality — and left having bought the company. Sailing World frames the story as company legend, naming the buyer "Les" Goodwin, Wendy Goodwin's grandfather and the same man as E.L.
Goodwin's tenure spanned the Second World War, when the yard built war tugs and launches for the military; Goodwin travelled to Washington to secure the contracts, which required boats drawing under 15 feet to navigate the Wareham River, keeping the yard building relatively small craft even at wartime scale, and employment grew under him from one worker to more than 100. Afterward the yard shifted back to small pleasure boats more easily than many larger builders managed, a flexibility that carried it through a wave of postwar closures elsewhere.
The next two Goodwin generations followed the same path: Gordon L. Goodwin, E.L.'s son, began working full time in 1969 and, in Sailing World's words, led the yard through its next chapter as a full-service boatyard, becoming president in 1979. Wendy J. Goodwin joined full time in 1993, briefly putting three generations of Goodwins on the payroll together before E.L. Goodwin died in July 1994 at 95.
The designers
Beyond Charles Gurney's own early designs, the yard began buying in outside plans well before its ownership changed hands: the Philip Rhodes-designed Rhodes 18 in the late 1930s, the Sparkman & Stephens-designed Mercury in 1940, and a set of designs purchased from George Lawley & Co. in 1941. In 1947 it bought the rights to Nathanael Herreshoff's entire catalog, and wooden Herreshoff 12½s continued to come off the line. Herreshoff's son Sidney later contributed designs of his own, as did Sparkman & Stephens again in 1962 with the Shields Class One-Design, developed for E.L. Goodwin's collaboration with Hall of Fame sailor Cornelius Shields. In 1972 the yard molded the first fiberglass example of Charles Wittholz's Cat, and in 1990 Gordon Goodwin worked with Sidney and Halsey Herreshoff to stretch the 18-foot Goldeneye into the 26-foot H-26. The Day Sailer Class Association brought a further name, Uffa Fox, into the fold in 1995.
Construction through the eras
Cape Cod built in wood for its first half-century. The shift to fiberglass began in 1947, when E.L. Goodwin, learning of the Navy's interest in the material, worked with a Mr. Bell of American Cyanamid in New York to develop fiberglass boatbuilding methods. A fast run of firsts followed: the first fiberglass MK Dinghy, a US Navy design, in 1948; the first fiberglass Herreshoff Bull's Eye — derived from the Herreshoff 12½ — in 1949; in 1950, what the yard calls the first lead keel on a fiberglass boat, fitted while converting the Rhodes 18 and Mercury to fiberglass; the first fiberglass Raven in 1951, with eight delivered to the US Coast Guard Academy; then the Burgess-designed Atlantic in 1956, the Knockabout in 1959, and the Nathanael Herreshoff-designed Goldeneye in 1960.
A 2017 profile described the process: hull and deck molded separately, sprayed with colored gelcoat, built up in fiberglass layers, then fitted with a lead keel once cured — all done in-house, in Wendy Goodwin's account, except the sails.
Lines and generations
The Mercury, purchased from Sparkman & Stephens in 1940, ran to more than 200 wood hulls by 1952 and went on to be long used as a sailing-program training boat. The Shields, a 1962 Sparkman & Stephens one-design, had an unusually divided build history: Cape Cod built sail numbers 1 through 20, Chris Craft Corp. built 21 through 190, Henry R. Hinckley Corp. built roughly 191 through 199, and the molds returned to Wareham in 1974 after nine years away, with Cape Cod resuming production from number 200 on.
The Cat traces to a wooden design called the Herman Cat; when the yard molded it in fiberglass for the first time in 1972, credited to Charles Wittholz, it kept the Herman Cat name before being marketed as the Cape Cod Cat from 1980 to 2006. The 30, also sold as the Blue Chip 30, was designed by A. Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff; Cape Cod Shipbuilding completed the last of 20 built in 1985.
The DaySailer carries the yard's most recent, and most tightly documented, design credit: Cape Cod's own history says the Day Sailer Class Association contracted the yard in 1995 to build Uffa Fox's design, recording the first sail number as 14201, and its FAQ separately dates the authorization to the same year — though a second account, placing E.L. Goodwin's 1994 death shortly before the contract, is consistent with 1994. The association held the DaySailer I's rights outright, with Cape Cod as authorized builder under an agreement struck in 1995.
Who Cape Cod is for
Cape Cod Shipbuilding suits a buyer drawn to New England one-design pedigree over a builder's own design office — a Wittholz daysailer, a Sparkman & Stephens racer, a Herreshoff-derived classic — each carrying its architect's name and, in the Shields and DaySailer, a class association's institutional backing rather than a single manufacturer's word alone.
