Lippincott sailboats: a Riverton, New Jersey one-design builder known for building other people's boats to class standard
Lippincott Boat Works spent most of its forty-year run building racing dinghies designed by other people — Lightnings, Comets, Stars, and the locally born Duster — from a family shop in Riverton, New Jersey, on the Delaware River. Only late in its history, under the founder's son, did the yard put its own name on a design.
Origins and ownership
Howard Franklin Lippincott — born October 23, 1919, the son of an architect who had raced sailing canoes on the Delaware River — was 26 in 1946 when he and his brother, Robert "Bob" Lippincott, began building boats for sale in Riverton, New Jersey, founding Lippincott Boat Works. The brothers' corporation turned out hundreds of Lightnings, Comets, Stars, and Dusters over the decades that followed, building one-design racing sailboats and cruising sailboats from the mid-1940s to 1985; Bob won the Star World Championship in 1950. Nearly all of the Lippincott siblings worked at the Boat Works at one time or another — all but one brother, Winfield — before the company closed in 1985. Howard was later named an Honorary Life Member of both the Riverton Yacht Club and the International Comet Class Association. He was survived by six children, including a son also named Howard Franklin Lippincott, styled Jr. and known as Skip — a distinct person from the founder — who lived in Riverton, New Jersey. Howard Sr. died August 26, 2005.
The designers
The company's boats come from two separate design traditions, one older than the firm and one belonging to it, and keeping them apart matters. The Duster — a thirteen-and-three-quarter-foot, flat-bottom, pram-bow dinghy meant to be home built — was designed by Jim (Owen P.) Merrill in 1933 and built by his father, Riverton Yacht Club Commodore E. K. Merrill, on the third floor of 301 Main Street the following winter, thirteen years before Lippincott Boat Works existed. The Historical Society of Riverton and the Riverton Yacht Club's own history independently confirm the same design credit, a doubly-sourced origin worth noting for a boat this small. Established as a class in 1946 and originating at the Riverton Yacht Club just outside Philadelphia, the Duster — first planked, later converted to plywood — spread throughout New Jersey and became closely associated with the Lippincott family, who built the boats without having designed them.
The yard's own keelboats arrived a generation later, credited to a different Lippincott: Howard "Skip" Lippincott Jr., the founder's son, who designed the Lippincott 30 in 1979. Our catalog also credits Skip Lippincott as designer of the Lippincott 36, from 1985, but no source confirms that attribution the way it confirms the 30's. Founder Howard Lippincott's own final boat, built for himself rather than for sale, was a 36-foot cruising sloop that continued the "Cirrus" name he had used for his earlier Star and Comet racing boats.
Construction through the eras
Lippincott Boat Works started out building in wood and switched to fiberglass earlier than many other one-design builders; Howard Lippincott is credited as the first boat builder to successfully make that change on the Star class. That conversion came with technical problems the Star's design posed for fiberglass construction, which Lippincott solved — two other builders who separately attempted the same conversion afterward could not, and stopped building Stars.
That same hand-laid approach carried into the yard's own keelboat decades later. A Spinsheet review of the Lippincott 30 describes a hull of hand-laid fiberglass laminates, decks and cabin structures built with a balsa core between fiberglass laminates, and wood structural components — full and partial plywood bulkheads bonded to the hull with fiberglass cloth and resin — used in place of fiberglass liners for reinforcement. The deck and hull join on an inward hull flange with adhesive sealant, nuts, bolts, and washers, and considerable care went into bedding hardware; the review judged the quality of construction and finish above that of most moderately priced production boats.
Lines and generations
Throughout most of the company's forty-year history, Lippincott Boat Works built one-design racing sailboats — Lightnings, Comets, Stars, and Dusters — to other designers' plans rather than its own. Its own cruising boats came late and stayed rare: the Lippincott 30, launched in 1979, was one of only two cruiser models the company ever built, and fewer than 100 were produced before it went out of production in the mid-1980s. The Lippincott 36 followed in 1985, the same year the company closed.
Who Lippincott is for
Lippincott suits sailors who value a fleet builder's reputation as much as a designer's: a family-run shop whose name is stamped on one-design racing hulls — Lightnings, Comets, Stars, and the club-born Duster — more often than on boats of its own creation. For anyone shopping the rarer cruising side, the 30 and, with less certainty, the 36 carry that same hand-built, one-design-yard construction discipline into a keelboat, from a company that built barely two cruiser models across its whole history.
