Well this ought to heat things up.
One of my hats these days is that of a Project Manager for Northwest Seaport. I am overseeing the distribution of artifacts salvaged from the 1897 schooner Wawona, which was cut up in the spring of 2009.
I issued a Request for Proposals and a Press Release a couple weeks ago. Should have posted it here then, but I didn’t want to scoop the press. Anyhow, check out the above article, and the project page, where you can view the RFP and a gallery of photographs. And, if you want a piece, let me know.
Direct democracy has entered the world of Federal preservation grant funding. One of my employers, Northwest Seaport, is in competition with two dozen other historic preservation groups for a National Trust for Historic Preservation grant to complete much-needed maintenance on the 1889 tugboat Arthur Foss. The money will be given out to those projects which receive the most online votes from the public, so your vote counts! Anyone can vote, and you can vote once a day. It’s Chicago-style: vote early and vote often. To cast your vote, visit the link here.
A few words about the worthy Arthur Foss: Originally named Wallowa, she was built as a steam tug in 1889 to haul sailing ships into Astoria, Oregon accross the notorious Columbia River Bar. Still under steam, Wallowa helped to bring supplies and miners to Alaska during the Yukon Gold Rush in 1898. Wallowa was acquired and renamed in 1929 by the Foss Launch & Tug Company and converted to diesel power. Her massive six-cylinder Washington Iron Works diesel engine (18 X 24, 700 hp) is comfortable at 170 rpm and is now maintained by Old Tacoma Marine.
Arthur Foss was loaned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934 and starred in the film Tugboat Annie as the Narcissus, which is said to have been the model for Steamboat Willy’s tug in the first cartoon to feature the character who would become Mickey Mouse. She served in the Hawaiian Islands in the early ’40s and was the last vessel to make it out of Wake Island before the Japanese invasion of 1942, a feat which she accomplished with some well-timed coats of gray paint.
Foss donated the Arthur to Northwest Seaport in 1970, and since then she has been a regular feature at historic ship and tug events from Puget sound to Alaska. She is moored at the Historic Ship’s Wharf at South Lake Union in downtown Seattle, and has been a National Historic Landmark since 1989.
For more on the Arthur Foss and the survey project which this grant will hopefully fund, see here. And vote now! One last note: if this grant comes through, it will put myself and many other shipwrights in the Seattle area to work in a difficult economy for our craft. Put your tax dollars to work on wooden ships!
For half a century up until last year, the schooner Wawona was moored on Lake Union in Seattle as a museum ship. Built in 1897, the ship served as a lumber schooner on the West coast and around the world, and as a fishing schooner in the dory-and-mothership cod fishery in the North Pacific.
Last year, Northwest Seaport, the preservation organization which owned the vessel, determined that it was no longer safe for visitors and that restoration was impracticable. NWS undertook a painstaking documentation, so thorough and groundbreaking that it is now being taught as a case-study in East Carolina University’s Marine Archaeology program. Once this documentation was completed, the ship was broken up by the Lake Union Dry Dock Company. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer coverage]
To further assure that the vessel’s history will be preserved, many pieces of it were saved. Since Northwest Seaport does not operate a campus or curate land-based exhibits, these artifacts will be distributed to other Museums and preservation organizations. The Wawona Artifact Distribution project is expected to take from now until at least June of 2010. I have been engaged by Northwest Seaport to undertake the management of this project.
See also:
Wawona’s sister ship, Thayer, restored and on display at San Francisco Maritime National Park: www.nps.gov/safr/historyculture/ca-thayer-history.htm
