Carpenters’ Roll, Please!

We always love to discover more about the people involved with Constitution over the years. We’ve recently learned all sorts of new things about the sailors who fought in the War of 1812, but now we’re taking a closer look at the hundreds of people who helped build and outfit the ship between 1795 and 1798.

The task has been a bit complicated by the relative scarcity of records.  A fire in the War Department in 1800 and the burning of the Navy Department and Treasury in 1814, along with a general disregard for obsolete paperwork during much of the 19th century, have left some disappointing holes in the record.  The “Papers of the War Department” project has done much to gather surviving correspondence from different repositories. We are optimistic that some of the financial records pertaining to Constitution‘s construction will be located within the Treasury Department records.  We’d really like to find the payrolls for the carpenters, blacksmiths, and general laborers employed at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard.  Once we have a good list of names, we can start pouring through the usual genealogical resources to learn more about the men and women who wielded the axes, adzes, hammers, tongs, needles, and thread to create America’s most famous ship.

The Museum’s collection includes three payrolls of carpenters engaged to repair the ship at the end of 1801 and in the late spring of 1802.  The labor force consisted of between 98 and 117 ship carpenters.  Some of the names seem familiar to us.  There are, for instance, Samuel and Joseph Hartt, the brothers of Edmund.  Not surprisingly, many of the men came from other coastal Massachusetts towns with strong shipbuilding traditions, including Gloucester, Scituate, and Hingham. Boston Navy Agent Samuel Brown had been advertising for carpenters since August 1801, and the ads appeared in many Massachusetts newspapers.

Those engaged in family history research love lists of names, so what follows is a transcription of one of the rolls.  The names in parenthesis indicate the man’s spelling of his own name in his signature (as opposed to the clerk’s spelling).

 

The Author(s)

Matthew Brenckle
Research Historian, USS Constitution Museum

Matthew Brenckle was the Research Historian at the USS Constitution Museum from 2006 to 2016.