New Hampshire Gunalows
Building the Replica Piscatuqua
July 16, 2025 - 7pm
Bath Freight Shed and Zoom
Rich Clyborne - Executive Director, Gundalow Company
Gundalows, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft barges, appeared in the Piscataqua River watershed in the mid-1600s, carrying cargo such as timber, building materials, supplies, textiles, salt marsh hay, and people to the towns that lined the rivers and bays in the Seacoast NH area. These iconic vessels were deemed the “18-wheelers” of the 18th and 19th centuries, helping to build the region’s economy by supplying the larger merchant ships that visited the deep-water port of Portsmouth with goods for trading up and down the East Coast of North America, as far east as Europe and the Mediterranean.
This presentation will touch on some of the history of gundalows including the phases of gundalow design and will focus on the construction of the Piscataqua in 2011. The Piscataqua is the only gundalow operating in the world today and the only gundalow certified to carry passengers out on the rivers and bays of the watershed.
This is the sixth of the 2025 Summer Lecture Series. The lectures will be held on Wednesday evenings at the Bath Freight Shed (27 Commercial St, Bath Maine). Recordings will be available here a couple of days later. You can also join by Zoom. The Zoom codes will be available a few days before the lecture.
The lectures are free, but if you consider them valuable, please donate to Maine’s First Ship in person or online.
Rich Clyborne is a 1982 graduate of the US Naval Academy, where he majored in Oceanography. He served six years on active duty before transitioning to the Naval Reserve. Over the next 30 years, he worked as a defense contractor developing anti-submarine warfare tactics for surface ships, a middle school and high school physical science teacher, a major gift officer at the Naval Academy Foundation, a systems analyst at Verizon and a contract program manager at the U.S. Naval Academy and Social Security Administration. He received a Master of Arts degree in Teaching from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT in 1999 and served with numerous nonprofit organizations as a board member, part-time staff member, and volunteer. He became the Executive Director of the Gundalow Company in July 2018.