A tern schooner on the Squamscot River
between Portsmouth and Exeter, New Hampshire,
the area where the Mary E. Crosby probably ended up

Old documents suggested that the Mary E. Crosby lived out her last years near Portsmouth or Exeter, New Hampshire. I wondered if Exeter could be correct, because it is inland, up a very small river out of Great Bay. But my son David, who lives on Great Bay, gave me Saltonstall's maritime history of Portsmouth, which had a picture of a tern schooner carrying coal up that very river. It must have been a sight. The undated photo was taken by members of the Horne family, who collected toll at the drawbridge in Stratham. The caption says, "Three-masted schooners in rolling farm country twenty miles from the sea were a common sight in the late nineteenth century." Saltonstall's history also says,

"Incidentally, many a coasting schooner passed up the [Squamscot] river under tow of the tugs Ida, [etc.] to the Newmarket and Exeter Manufacturing Companies with coal,...guided over the middle-grounds by stakes with white streamers on them, set out at low tide early each spring by the river men. Along with the gundalows, these schooners helped dispose of large quantities of bricks manufactured along the Piscataqua [River] at this time" [William G.Saltonstall, Ports of the Piscataqua (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1941) p. 186.]

[Detail.] The helmsman probably can't see the bridge too well but seems to have a lookout forward. There seems to be at least one yawl boat to help the tug. Is the schooner pumping her bilges to lighten, or are those fenders?

I have no idea whether this photo is of the Mary E.Crosby. Probably it isn't. But it does show a work-a-day schooner like the Crosby going about her business in the nooks and crannies of the New England coast.