Herreshoff sailboats: one name across six builders and a century of design
On the used-sailboat market, "Herreshoff" rarely names a single manufacturer. It is a design lineage that has passed through at least six distinct builders and eras since Nathanael Greene Herreshoff began drawing boats in Bristol, Rhode Island: the original Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co.'s long-running H-12 1/2 line, the fiberglass Doughdish reproduction, a wood recreation of one of Herreshoff's own daysailers, a fiberglass catboat built from a modified early hull design, and a 1980s cat-ketch cruiser line drawn by a later Herreshoff. Two boats badged "Herreshoff" can come from different builders, different materials, and different decades — the era and the yard matter as much as the name.
Origins and ownership
In 1878, John Brown Herreshoff, a blind boatbuilder from Bristol who had been in business since 1863, went into partnership with his younger brother Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, a steam engineer and self-taught naval architect, to found the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company. Between 1893 and 1914, Nathanael designed and built seven America's Cup racing sloops; five were selected as defenders, and all five won. Alongside the Cup boats, the company launched a run of one-design classes — among them the Herreshoff 12 1/2, the 15-footers, the S boats, and the New York 30s, 40s, and 50s — and racing and cruising yachts up to 162 feet overall. Nathanael Herreshoff died in 1938; the company built more than 2,000 boats before closing in 1945, after the deaths of both founding brothers and a wartime collapse in demand for large yachts. In 1971, A. Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff and Rebecca Chase Herreshoff founded the Herreshoff Marine Museum to preserve the firm's legacy; its collection spans more than seventy boats, from the 8 1/2-foot dinghy Nathanael to the 75-foot America's Cup defender Defiant, built in 1992.
The designers
Nathanael Herreshoff designed the great majority of boats built at the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co. during its lifetime, including the Alerion, a 26-foot shoal-draft sloop he designed for himself in 1912 at age 64; the original is preserved, no longer sailed, at Mystic Seaport. The Rozinante, published in The Rudder and in L. Francis Herreshoff's 1956 book The Compleat Cruiser, represents a separate strand of the family's design work, drawn more than a decade after the Bristol company closed. Later generations of the family worked as designers and consultants for the builders that carried the Herreshoff name forward after 1945: Sidney Herreshoff drew the fiberglass Gemini for Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. in 1962, Halsey Herreshoff designed the Cat Ketch Corporation's H-31 cruiser line in the 1980s, and in 1990 Sidney and Halsey Herreshoff worked together with the company to enlarge its 18-foot Goldeneye into the 26-foot H-26.
Construction through the eras
Herreshoff construction spans wood and fiberglass in an order that rewards checking, not assuming. The Herreshoff 12 1/2 was built in wood at the original company from 1914 until Herreshoff Manufacturing Co. ended its own production of the model. The Quincy Adams Yacht Yard was then licensed to continue building it under the Herreshoff builder's plate, completing 51 hulls between 1943 and 1948. In 1947, Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. separately acquired the rights to Nathanael Herreshoff's designs and built about 35 more wooden hulls between 1948 and 1950. Cape Cod Shipbuilding's move into fiberglass came gradually and model by model: its first fiberglass Bull's Eye was molded in 1949, the fiberglass Marlin followed in 1957, the Goldeneye in 1960, and the fiberglass Gemini in 1962, while the company's own fiberglass H-12 1/2 did not arrive until 1972 — more than two decades after it stopped building the model in wood. Outside Cape Cod Shipbuilding, other builders took other routes: Alfie Sanford's 1977 Alerion Class Sloop recreation used the then-new cold-molding process to build in wood, while the Cat Ketch Corporation's H-31 line, built between 1979 and 1986, split between cold-molded mahogany hulls and fiberglass hulls cored with Airex.
Lines and generations
At least six distinct builder-and-era combinations share the Herreshoff name on the used market. The original Herreshoff Manufacturing Company ran from 1878 to 1945 in Bristol, building everything from small one-designs to 162-foot yachts under Nathanael Herreshoff. Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co., a yard that had been building boats since 1899, bought the Herreshoff design rights in 1947 and has built the H-12 1/2 in wood and, since 1972, in fiberglass. A separate fiberglass reproduction of the 12 1/2, trademarked the Doughdish, was introduced in 1973 with molds taken from the lines of three original wooden hulls; its creator, Bill Harding, deliberately avoided fiberglass's usual weight savings to keep the boat authentic to the original in everything but material, and production passed from Harding to Edey & Duff of Mattapoisett and later to Stephen Ballentine and his daughter Amy Ballentine Stevens at Ballentine's Boat Shop. Separately, sailor Alfie Sanford revived Nathanael Herreshoff's personal Alerion design in 1977 as the cold-molded wood Alerion Class Sloop; no longer in standard production, it is still available to special order through Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin, Maine. A fifth line, the fiberglass Herreshoff America catboat, came from Nowak & Williams of Bristol in the 1970s, built from a Halsey Herreshoff modification of a 1904 catboat hull design by Nathanael Herreshoff; more than a hundred were built from those molds, which later passed to Squadron Yachts and then to Nauset Marine of Orleans, Massachusetts. The sixth line belongs to the Cat Ketch Corporation, which built about 100 Halsey Herreshoff-designed H-31 cat ketches between 1979 and 1986, alongside smaller runs of the related H-27, H-38, and H-45.
Who Herreshoff is for
A Herreshoff-badged boat suits a buyer willing to research the specific hull rather than shop the badge. An original wooden one-design, a Cape Cod Shipbuilding H-12 1/2, a Doughdish, an Alerion Class Sloop, a Herreshoff America catboat, and a Cat Ketch Corporation H-31 are six different kinds of boats built by six different yards, sharing a name and, in most cases, a Herreshoff-family design pedigree rather than a common builder or construction method.
