Concordia sailboats: a hurricane-born yawl design that outlived three owners and a fiberglass venture
Concordia is inseparable from a single boat: a yawl that began as just another commission for a small Massachusetts brokerage and became one of the most enduring stock racer-cruisers ever built. The firm that produced it worked across brokerage, design, and boatbuilding for the better part of a century, changing hands repeatedly and even splitting into competing entities, while the yawl itself stayed in continuous production for 28 years and outlived every version of the company that built it.
Origins and ownership
Llewellyn Howland established Concordia Company in Boston in 1926, naming it after a Howland family whaling vessel. In 1932 he transferred it to his son Waldo Howland and Marblehead racing figure C. Raymond Hunt, who ran it as a boat brokerage through the 1930s; its first design was a 12-foot frostbite dinghy, Plover, built by Pat O'Connell, a former Lawley employee, and its first commission for a larger boat came in 1936, the 28-foot Weepecket. In 1938 the firm moved from Boston to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and added naval architect Wilder B. Harris to its staff — the same year the Great Hurricane of 1938 ruined many of the boats moored in Padanaram Harbor, including the Howland family's own Escape, a Colin Archer-designed Norwegian pilot boat built in 1890. Llewellyn Howland hired the firm to design and build her replacement: design number fourteen, drawn in the hurricane's wake and introduced in 1938-1939, with the first boat completed by 1939. What started as just another Concordia design became the Concordia yawl.
Waldo Howland sold the company to Bill Pinney in 1969; Pinney owned it until 1981, helping solidify its reputation while continuing to build the Beetle Cat and expanding its boatyard services for fiberglass yachts. Robert "Brodie" MacGregor, who first visited Padanaram on a 1964 New York Yacht Club cruise, moved to the town a decade later after earning a Harvard MBA, worked three years in the Concordia office, and bought the company from Pinney in 1981. Around 1986 he split the business into two entities — Concordia Yacht Builders and Concordia Co. Inc., a Padanaram yacht service and repair operation — and in 1990 sold controlling interest in the boatbuilding side to William Steitz of Pennsylvania while keeping ownership of the building it occupied. By 1996 that entity, by then known as Concordia Custom Yachts, closed on October 15, leaving about 30 people out of work. Concordia Co. Inc. continued in service and repair; when the Howland family put the South Wharf waterfront property on the market in 2006, Concordia failed to win the bid to retain it, and in August 2007 the boatyard moved its operations to 14 acres on Gulf Road that MacGregor had purchased in 1987 — a site formerly home to Concordia Custom Yachts and to Hunt Yachts.
The designers
C. Raymond Hunt, born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1908, left his job with Boston naval architect Frank Paine in 1932 to form Concordia Co. with Waldo Howland. The company's own directory credits Hunt with the yawl's design, with significant input from Howland, and the Mystic Seaport archive separately lists designs by R.D. Culler, corroborating a design association he held with the firm alongside them. Hunt's reputation grew well beyond Concordia: his own Concordia 41, Harrier, designed in 1953, carried him and his family to a six-race sweep of Cowes Week in England in 1955 against the best British yachts of the day, and author Stan Grayson credited associates from Bill Harris at Concordia through Fenwick Williams and Arthur Martin in Hunt's later office before Hunt formalized a partnership with John Deknatel in 1961. He died in 1978 at age 70.
Construction through the eras
Oyster Bay yachtsman Drayton Cochran commissioned the first Abeking & Rasmussen-built yawl, beginning a relationship that produced 103 boats between 1938 and 1966, all but four built at the German yard — then known mainly for commercial vessels — under what the company calls a handshake agreement with Waldo Howland: A&R shipped completed hulls to Concordia before receiving final payment, and left many finishing details to the Concordia yard, at a price the company describes as very reasonable. The trust ran deep enough that A&R's own model builder, Herr Potzka, built a scale model of a Concordia yawl that arrived unannounced in the forecastle of the 75th hull, Westray, and still sits in Concordia's office as a tribute to the partnership. Irene, hull number 103, was the last yawl shipped from the Lemwerder yard, in 1966. On the Concordia 41 — Hunt's own Harrier — SAIL magazine noted a pretty but leak-prone butterfly-wing foredeck skylight, prone to leaks when green water comes aboard. Most of the fleet survives: Soundings counted 102 of the 103 boats still extant, and the company's own directory puts survival even higher once a boat launched in 2019 is counted.
Lines and generations
Under Bill Pinney's ownership in the 1970s, Concordia continued building the Beetle Cat catboat while developing fiberglass boatyard services for other builders' yachts. Decades after the yawl fleet, the Concordia name resurfaced once more, unrelated to the Padanaram lineage: launched in 1996, the same year the fiberglass Concordia Custom Yachts operation closed, the Concordia 47 was a Bruce Farr design built by Carroll Marine and marketed by Farr International — described by Sailing Magazine as Carroll Marine's first entry into the performance-cruiser field, built in vacuum-bagged E-glass and Kevlar with a carbon-fiber rudder. No source ties it to a licensing arrangement with the Padanaram builder; it stands as a separate, unrelated use of the name.
Who Concordia is for
A Concordia buyer is drawn to a design and ownership story more than a single product line: a hand-built wooden yawl fleet from a Massachusetts brokerage-turned-boatyard, sustained across ownership changes from the Howland family through Pinney and MacGregor, in a company that persisted in the boatyard and repair trades even after its custom-yacht arm closed in 1996.
