SCHS: Photo of the Week / 11.23.24 -- Master Boatbuilder Gilbert M. Smith / The Moonbeam, 1909

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Photo of the Week / 11.13.2024

FROM THE SCHS LIBRARY & ARCHIVE

“How shall we know it is us without our past?”
– John Steinbeck

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(Sail #4, fiberglass reproduction). The Moonbeam, a racing champion created by Gil Smith in 1909, was the most versatile small boat of all of the master boatbuilder’s many celebrated designs. (Photo taken at the Bellport Bay Festival, c. 1983. Image from the Gil Smith Collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society Library & Archive. Copyright © Suffolk County Historical Society. All rights reserved.)

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Lifelong Long Islander Gilbert Monroe Smith (1843-1940) was a master boatbuilder best known for building very fine, very fast sailboats that were difficult to beat in a race. A 1963 New York Times article described Gil Smith’s catboats, highly prized racing craft, as “examples of master craftsmanship and pioneering design that is acknowledged by the Smithsonian Institution.” A catboat is a centerboard boat with a plumb mast stepped well into the bow.

Born in Manorville in 1843, Gil Smith built his first sailboat at age seventeen. He was a sailor on coastal schooners and, during the Civil War, a seaman aboard vessels that brought supplies to Union soldiers. He also worked as a bayman and duck hunter, and crafted duck decoys and gunning boats. Interestingly, both Smith and his wife, Marion Eliza Terry (born in Riverhead), were descendants of families that landed in Southold in 1640 (the Hallocks and the Terrys, respectively). Gil and Marion Eliza lived long enough to celebrate their 74th wedding anniversary!

After moving with his wife and five children to Amity Street in Patchogue in 1876, Gil Smith set up shop on the Patchogue River, where he established himself as a master boatbuilder, crafting sailboats for local baymen and for highly competitive sportsmen to race on the Great South Bay. His method involved making a perfectly crafted half model first, and then with meticulous care he would build an exact enlargement of the half model. (A series of 23 of Gil Smith’s original half models were donated by his family to the permanent collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society.) Smith built an estimated four hundred boats at Patchogue over sixty years before his death in 1940 at the age of ninety-seven.

by Wendy Polhemus-Annibell, Head Librarian

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