NATHANAEL GREENE HERRESHOFF AND JOHN BROWN HERRESHOFF: THE ART OF THE SAIL

More has been written about Nat and J.B. Herreshoff than about any  Rhode Islanders other than Roger Williams, Nathanael Greene, and Thomas Wilson Dorr. This essay is my attempt to tell their story concisely. Their descendant, Halsey C. Herreshoff, read this biographical synopsis, made suggestions, and then gave it his nihil obstat.

Known throughout America and the Atlantic world as the boatbuilders of Bristol,@ Captain Nat and AJ.B. Herreshoff revolutionized the yachting world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

They descended from prominent ancestors. Their grandparents were Karl Friedrich Herreshoff (1769-1819), a German immigrant from Prussia who was acquainted with ruler Frederick the Great, and Sarah Brown, daughter of the dominant Providence merchant and businessman, John Brown. The parents of Nat and J.B. were Charles Frederick Herreshoff, Jr., who was adept both at sailing and boat design, and Julia Ann Lewis of Boston.  

Charles and Julia had nine children. Their fourth, John Brown Herreshoff, was born in Bristol on April 24, 1841; their seventh, Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, made his debut in Bristol on March 18, 1848.

At the age of fourteen, J.B. became totally blind, an affliction that was suffered by three other siblings. This handicap did not deter J.B. because he was a genius.  After a solo start in 1861, J.B. began a yacht-building business in Bristol with Dexter S. Stone in 1864 under the name Herreshoff & Stone.

At first, the Bristol company built sailing vessels, some of which were modeled by J.B. himself.  In the early 1870s, under J.B.=s sole ownership, the firm shifted its focus to building steam yachts and then to innovative torpedo boats for the navies of the United States and three other countries.

While J.B. was operating a very successful and highly-regarded business, his younger brother, Nat, was gaining a formal education and honing his innate mechanical skills.  After schooling in Bristol, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he built a rotary steam engine as a class project.  Upon graduation in 1869, he went to work for the Corliss Steam Engine Company, as did other notable inventors of that era such as William Nicholson of Nicholson File Company fame whose family later summered in Bristol and sailed Herreshoff boats.

While in the employ of Corliss, Nat made designs for his brother in his spare time, the most notable of which was of the novel catamaran yacht Amaryllis built in 1876. That two-hulled boat sailed so fast that its type was banned from sailboat racing competitions in Long Island Sound.

In 1876, Nat traveled with George Corliss to Philadelphia for the great Centennial Exposition and was in charge of assembling the giant Corliss steam engine that powered the machinery displayed at this exhibition of American inventive ingenuity.

After his Philadelphia triumph, Nat joined with J.B. in 1878 to form the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, and thereafter this dynamic duo made yachting history.

Captain Nat proved to be a naval architect and a mechanical engineer without peer. With J.B. as the president, exhibiting management skills and business expertise, and Nat rendering innovative designs, the company flourished.  By the 1890s, its facility on Bristol harbor had grown from about twenty employees to over three hundred, most of whom were Bristolians.

Despite its great success in building steam yachts, torpedo boats, launches, high speed marine engines, and tubular boilers, the company gained its enduring fame designing and/or constructing a series of racing yachts that eight times won competitions with England for the America=s Cup, yachting=s most prestigious prize.  

A profile of this length does not allow a detailed discussion concerning the background of these occasional competitions, or a statistical analysis of the Herreshoff-designed and built Cup defenders, five of which Captain Nat designed: Vigilant (1893), Defender (1895), Columbia (1899 and 1901), Reliance (1903), and Resolute (1920).

The Reliance, the largest and most notable of these vessels, was the fastest mono-hull Cup defender ever.  It was 143′ 8″ long and carried 16,700 square feet of sail on a single mast that was 199′ 6″ high to the tip of  its topmast.  Its image now graces a U.S. coin–the Rhode Island quarter.

J.B. married Sarah Kilton of Boston in 1870 and fathered one daughter, Katherine, who married into Bristol’s renowned DeWolf family.  After J.B. divorced Sarah, he wed Eugenia Tucker of Bristol in 1892.  J.B. died on July 20, 1915, at the age of seventy-four and was buried in Bristol’s Juniper Hill Cemetery.

Captain Nat had even greater longevity, living to the age of ninety.  During his extensive yachting career, he designed well over 2,000 craft, and his company produced more than 18,000 boats of various kinds.  Among his customers were the Vanderbilts, the Belmonts, the Whitneys, and J.P. Morgan.  Nat married Clara Anna DeWolf in 1883, by whom he had six children.  After her death in 1905, he married Ann Roebuck, who survived him.

Nat lived to see his company decline in the early 1920s when it was purchased by Rhode Island Hall of Fame inductee, Rudolf F.  Haffenreffer, a wealthy Fall River, Massachusetts brewer who maintained a summer estate on Mount Hope in Bristol.  Under Haffenreffer, who also owned Narragansett Brewing Company in Cranston, the Herreshoff tradition continued with Captain Nat still playing an advisory role and continuing to model new craft.

The firm’s final two America’s Cup victors–Enterprise in 1930 and Rainbow in 1934– were designed by W. Starling Burgess, son of Edward Burgess, a Bostonian who had crafted three successful defenders of the Cup in the 1880s before Captain Nat’s long reign.

The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company continued to operate through World War II, producing exactly 100 vessels for the U.S. military.  In 1946, at war’s end, the shipyard closed.  By that date, Nat had also passed away.  He died at his Hope Street home “Love Rocks@ on June 2, 1938 at the age of ninety and joined J.B. in Juniper Hill Cemetery.  He was survived by his second wife and five of his six children.

Captain Nat has been the subject of numerous biographies.  His son, L. Francis Herreshoff, also a talented marine architect, in a biography entitled Capt. Nat Herreshoff: Wizard of Bristol (1953) detailed and analyzed more than two dozen of his father’s achievements and innovations.  Other notable works are Maynard Bray and Carlton Pinheiro,  Herreshoff of Bristol (1989);  Christopher Pastore, Temple to the Wind: The Story of America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Masterpiece Reliance (2005);  and a series of excellent books and articles by Bristol historian Richard V. Simpson. 

As if the deluge of books were not sufficient, Capt. Nat and J.B. are memorialized in the Herreshoff Marine Museum founded on the site of the shipyard in 1971 by Nat’s son, A. Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff, and his daughter-in-law Rebecca (Chase) Herreshoff.  Allied with the museum is the America’s Cup Hall of Fame created in 1992 by Kenneth Dooley and Halsey Chase Herreshoff, naval architect, America’s Cup sailor, and Bristol civic leader, who has joined his grandfather, Nat, and his uncle, J.B., in the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.