Brooklin, Maine, has wooden boatbuilding in its veins. It’s home to the WoodenBoat School, which, since 1981, has taught more than 20,000 people about the construction, maintenance, repair, design and seamanship of wooden boats. The town is also home to Brooklin Boat Yard and other builders who keep the craftsmanship alive. Yes, it’s a stretch when these folks call their town “the boatbuilding capital of the world,” but when it comes to wooden boats, they proudly mean it.

Amid all this sawdust is the Friend Memorial Public Library, which got its start in the late 1800s and has held on with the town’s tiny, year-round population of about 800 people. The current building was renovated in the 1990s and is used not just by the locals, but also by summertime tourists. They all understand how wooden boatbuilding defines the local culture, and how precious that culture has become in today’s fiberglass and carbon world.

So it is that this little library has managed to raise $2 million toward a $3 million goal to build an addition that will showcase the history of wooden boatbuilding in an unprecedented way.

In fact, they’re well on track to start construction this year on what will become the Anne and Maynard Bray Maritime Research Center, giving the general public in-person and online access to some of the richest collections of wooden-boatbuilding publications, photographs and more that have ever been assembled.

“I’m assuming that the addition to the library with the Maritime Research Center will be built by 2026,” says Robert Baird, chairman of the capital campaign. “I never really fully comprehended how important these materials are to people who are interested in wooden boats all over the world. We’ve raised a lot of that $2 million from people locally, but we’ve also raised a lot of that money from people who don’t live here and are passionate about wooden boats.”

The idea for the research center began with WoodenBoat magazine founder Jon Wilson, who has amassed one of the largest private collections of materials related to wooden-boat and yacht history, building and design. In addition to historical books—some rare and irreplaceable—he gathered periodicals and more dating back to the 1880s.

“There are all kinds of real treasures,” Baird says. “There are drawings and documents and journals. If you want to find out about any types of construction for traditional boats, there are books about that.”

For instance, Baird says, he personally owns a 28-footer designed by C.C. Hanley and built in 1927. “It was the last catboat he designed,” Baird says. “I could go to the library, find articles from Yachting magazine in 1928 about the building of that boat, and then the next year about the cruising of that boat. Those are the things that are really incredible.”

Wilson’s decision to give this collection to the Friend Memorial Public
Library inspired longtime photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz to hand over his personal collection, too. It includes about 155,000 slides he made from 1979 to 2005.

The images will be combined with Wilson’s collection to form the foundation of the new research center’s holdings.

“In 2005, I went to digital, and those images will eventually go there as well as my career winds down,” Mendlowitz says. “There are certainly quite a few scans that already exist of the slides because they were published in various books and the calendar, but there are lots of images that haven’t been scanned. We’re hoping that with the help of volunteers, we can scan the collection and make it available for research online.”

Baird says the research center’s name is a tribute to Anne and Maynard Bray because of yet another person who cherishes wooden boats. Anne helped to build up the library for more than 30 years, Baird says, while Maynard was technical editor at WoodenBoat for 40 years. A friend of Maynard’s wanted to recognize those contributions to the culture.

“One of the friends from the wooden boat community heard about this collection coming to the Friend Memorial Library,” Baird says, “and that friend said he’d raise $500,000 to put Anne and Maynard’s names on the maritime research center.”

Mendlowitz says that from an artistic perspective, the images he’s most interested in from his collection capture unique light, but he also understands the practical value of all his unseen slides becoming available to the public: “It’s mostly a record, a visual record of wooden boats. Since wooden boats are unique—they’re not usually a class boat with multiple copies—a lot of them continue to exist today. If somebody purchases a wooden yacht and is undertaking a restoration of it, or it’s been restored, they would be able to go back into the archives and discover what the boat was like 40 years ago when I photographed it. That has a lot of appeal to me, to think about somebody who is passionate about a boat they just acquired being able to go back and look at it.”

The whole endeavor has been wonderful, Baird says, not only for the Brooklin community, but also for the global community of people who love wooden boats. “That’s the thing that’s really great about it,” he says. “This is a fun, positive project in a world today with so many things that can be so discouraging. It’s great to be able to focus on good things.” 

March 2025