Why the "Liberty Builder's Home", or

What's in a Name?

The house on 30 Fern Lane in South portland had been in existence for over a hundred years.  I bought it in 1991, and lived in it until 2009.  

One day, while visiting friends at the old South Portland Shipyard on Front Street, one of the workers was delighted to find out where I lived: He grew up in that house!.

Naturally, we spent some time talking about the house.  He told me about his father who joined the Todd Bath shipyard during World War II, and that he worked for the New England Shipbuilding Company until  he retired.  

Most of the credit of the Liberty Ships is given to the west coast Kiser shipyards.  But the design originated in England as the Ocean Class ships.  The British came to the US to have those ships built, and Todd Bath Iron Shipbuilding, of  Bath Maine, answered the call to build 30 “Ocean Class” ships.  The ships where coal burning, but other than that, were much like the Liberty Ships designs that followed when the US needed them. 

In 1940 Todd Bath purchased Cushing Cove, where SMCC (Southern Maine Community College, formerly “Fort Preble”) pier and Spring Point marine  now stands. They proceeded to enclose the cove, dry it, and created a ‘dry-dock’ shipbuilding system, where ships were built in groups, 2 and 3 at a time, in the dry building bays, and when ready, the floodgate would open, and the ships floated for final fitting in the adjacent piers that still stand.  At the time, this was revolutionary.

 By 1943 the shipyard, now called New England Shipbuilding Company, extended from today’s Sunset Marina to Fort Road, including today’s Bug Light Park, and parts of SMCC .

Look east from your window in the Liberty Builder Home, or go north for a stroll in neighboring SMCC (Do not miss that – it is a great place, and an easy walk right nearby).  Today’s calm and serene scene, with the fantastic views of water, islands, and rich marine activities, hides the fact that in the 1940’s, this was one seriously busy place!

  Just imagine now, the type of place this was!  Portland was one of the largest departure ports for convoys to Europe, together with massive naval presence required for that operation, anti-submarine warfare and other naval schools, the harbor defense, and the Atlantic command of all these activities. Long island housed a huge fuel depo and a torpedo school, radio operators and firefighters studied and trained in Portland and South Portland, in Fort Preble, the old armory, and in Fort Williams.   The bay was teaming with ships for all the war years.  According to one long tale, one could go from South Portland to the islands just by jumping from one ship to the next!

   Things at the shipyard were just as busy.  Workers came to the area by the thousands – the shipyard employed 30,000, 3700 of them women.  Large parts of Fort  Preble became welding schools – which laid the foundation to today’s SMCC.  Work continued 24 hours a day- cutting steel, heating rivets, repairing tools, moving heavy pieces of ship structure, all with levels of noise, smoke, and traffic - including hunderds of busses to bus the workers. All that activity on the shipyard created 30 ocean Class and 266 Liberty Class ships – the gray soldiers that helped the Allies to win the war.

Now, when you comfortably vacation in the Liberty Builder Home, and look out at your beautiful, clean, and calm surroundings, just imagine how busy this beautiful bay looked to the tenant of the time, the real Liberty Ship builder.  For you, it is a vacation like no other.  For him, it meant getting up incredibly early, or arriving home at the dark of night, while enabling – day in and day out – the US and its allies to win the war.  Little glory was given to those that built the ships that took part in each theatre of WWII.  But without them, who knows what it would have taken for  the Allies to win this war.

After him and his friends, in true appreciation and thanks, I named his/my home.

More on:

 Liberty Ships.

 Todd Bath Iron Shipbuilding and the New England Ship building.

Portland Harbor Museum

South Portland Shipyards Oral History Project