Verftsinformasjon: Kennebunck

Jorge Christenson was born into a shipbuilding family in Bergen, Norway, in 1826. He and his brother Jacob immigrated to this country in early 1850 to escape the high unemployment rate in their native land. Jacob settled first in a Norwegian community in Wisconsin, but eventually built ships at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Jorge settled in Kennebunk, Maine.

Jorge Christenson was born into a shipbuilding family in Bergen, Norway, in 1826. He and his brother Jacob immigrated to this country in early 1850 to escape the high unemployment rate in their native land. Jacob settled first in a Norwegian community in Wisconsin, but eventually built ships at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Jorge settled in Kennebunk, Maine.

Shipbuilding in the Kennebunks was in a period of transition when he arrived. Until the early 1840s most of the ships launched on the river were built at Kennebunk Landing. The demand for larger ships and growing competition from ship builders in Lower Village and Kennebunkport, motivated a group of up-river ship builders, owners and merchants to invest in building river locks. The gates were to be closed until sufficient water had been captured to float enormous vessels over the rocky falls. When the locks were finished in 1849 ship builders Stephen Ward of Kennebunkport and Clement Littlefield of Lower Village were already working hard to make them irrelevant. The locks remained operable for 19 years, but the yards downriver had an obvious financial advantage. Shipbuilding at the Landing dwindled after the Civil War and the locks were abandoned.

Young Jorge Christenson was welcomed into Clement Littlefield’s home and given a job in his growing shipyard in 1850. After a few years the ambitious Norwegian had saved enough money to purchase a home using his newly Americanized name George. He married Maria Stackpole and sent to Norway for his father Christen and the rest of his brothers and sisters. In 1853, hoping to someday operate a shipyard of his own, he joined forces with some of his Lower Village neighbors to buy a piece of land on the river just north of the bridge to Kennebunkport.

Just then, when the future looked bright for Norwegians living in Kennebunk, the economy took a nose dive and shipbuilding in the Kennebunks suffered an alarming decline. Local diarist Andrew Walker wrote that the only people making money in shipbuilding in 1856 were the lawyers whose job it was to inventory the belongings of failed business owners and negotiate the 15 cents on the dollar their creditors felt lucky to get. The assets of both the D&S Ward Shipyard and the Emmons Littlefield Shipyard were assigned to lawyers within 24 hours of one another.

Shrewd Landing shipbuilder Nathaniel Lord Thompson seized the opportunity to move his considerable operations below the bridge. He purchased the bankrupt Emmons Littlefield Yard retaining master carpenter Clement Littlefield and his son in-law David Clark. Clark later bought a piece of the old Emmons Littlefield Yard from Thompson and went into business for himself. George Christenson decided to go it alone on his riverfront lot above the bridge. His first vessel, the barque Jacob Merrill, was launched from the Christenson Shipyard in the spring of 1858. In the years that followed, George built several vessels for N. L. Thompson and a few for himself. Work was scarce during the Civil War, but he got by building one or two schooners a year. The Norwegian shipbuilder was regarded as an honest and methodical man. He acquired several adjoining lots — expanding his shipyard while real estate was cheap. When the war ended George hit the ground running and for several years his shipyard thrived.

The Christenson family moved to Milwaukee in 1868 where many of their kin had settled, but returned to Kennebunk in 1872 and resumed shipbuilding in the Christenson Yard. The largest ship ever built there was George’s last — the Louis V. Place, a 698 ton schooner that was launched Aug. 2, 1890. When George died in the middle of the night of March 3, 1891, at 65 years old, it seemed he had prepared himself for passage. Andrew Walker recorded the event in his diary. “Last Monday night George Christenson, a shipbuilder at the Port, about Midnight, arose, partly dressed himself and laid down on a sofa. At 3 o’clock his wife spoke to him. Receiving no reply she went to him and found he was dead.”

George’s son William kept the Christenson Shipyard open through 1892. David Clark, who had moved across the river into the old Ward Shipyard in 1880, built his last ship, the four-masted schooner Savannah, in 1901. Stephen Ward’s son Charles built ships at the old Emmons Littlefield Yard in Lower Village until July 10, 1918, when he launched the last of the large sailing vessels built on the Kennebunk River. The four-masted schooner was appropriately named the Kennebunk.