Eric Graves stands in front of the U.S. Brig Niagara at Sample’s Shipyard in Boothbay Harbor. Graves and his team have been restoring the 20-gun warship for the past year. (Christine Simmonds photo)
Eric Graves stumbled upon Maine by accident as a young adult, after discovering an unexpected love of wooden boats. He quickly knew this was where he wanted to live, work, and raise a family.
Luckily, his wife agreed.
“Once I got a taste of Maine, and saw all this great stuff happening in a larger scale up and down the coast, that’s kind of where I had to be,” he said.
Since then, Graves has made his mark on the shipbuilding industry and the community. He has worked on historic ships, cofounded a marine science center for local children, raised three boys, fostered other children, and adopted a daughter.
Graves’ journey to Maine started with a journey to find himself. Graves said he didn’t do well in high school and didn’t want to go to college. But he loved to draw, and discovered he loved drafting, also known as technical drawing. These are drawings that demonstrate how an item functions.
His parents said he had to do something after high school, so Graves enrolled in a mechanical drafting program at a community college in New York. Eventually he ended up in a course where he built a wooden kayak followed by a replica of his great-grandfather’s wooden rowboat and discovered his love of handiwork.
“That got me out of the book and off the drafting table and into doing something with my hands,” Graves said. “It was just an incredible experience. That’s kind of the connection that I made into working with your hands and working with the wood. I jumped right into the minor program with that.”
That program also included time at The WoodenBoat School, a vocational school in Brooklin offering courses in boatbuilding, woodworking, and other related skills. Graves spent a few summers there and fell in love with Maine.
Despite not knowing anyone in the state, Graves, his wife Sharolyn, and their baby moved to the Edgecomb area in 1994, and he started his career as a shipbuilder.
Graves is currently the project manager at Sample Shipyard in Boothbay Harbor, where he has worked for 22 years. His primary work is restoring historic, nonprofit museum vessels.
“This has been pretty much my commitment as a professional for quite a while now,” he said. “Doing these engaging, big, classic, historic ship restorations has been a great thing.”
His project at the shipyard for the past year has been the restoration of the U.S. Brig Niagara for the state of Pennsylvania. This massive, 20-gun warship is a replica from the War of 1812, and usually functions as part of the Erie Maritime Museum.
“There’s a lot of great history,” Graves said. “It won the battle of Lake Erie and really, really made things happen during that time period.”
Graves also regularly contracts with the steamship Katahdin in Greenville, which was built in 1914 at Bath Iron Works. Graves said he and his team have been performing restoration work on the museum vessel for about nine years, keeping it sailing every summer.
Graves said Sample’s Shipyard is really the only shipyard on the east coast that does this kind of government restoration work, and it is only possible because of the company’s dedication to maintaining the shipbuilding techniques from the 1860s.
“There’s not many places doing this,” he said.
He is fortunate to have a management team and owner who support this kind of work, as well as a great team with a variety of background and abilities, Graves said. He added there are also some younger workers who are stepping up to learn the same historic techniques.
“To me, the wooden ships bring people together,” Graves said. “We all have a passion. There’s historical value. A ship kind of comes to life in a way. It’s a moving, floating object that can really do a lot of great educational programs.”
Graves is also the cofounder of the nonprofit Boothbay Sea and Science Center, which he started with Executive Director and President Pauline Dion in 2012.
“My son, who was 12 years old at the time, was one of the first kids in the program,” Graves said. “We started it here at the shipyard.”
While that first year the program only had about 15 children, Graves said the center now serves about 250 kids each summer for a nine-week program of marine activities, plus a seaweed growing program in about 25 schools.
He said the center has also developed partnerships with organizations like Big Brothers/Big Sisters in order to reach more children.
Graves said he knows he has been fortunate in his life, and has been helped by many people through the years. Recognizing this, he tries to find ways to help others, especially young people.
Graves said his dream for the center is to offer a trades program, including maritime trades, to facilitate those opportunities.
“Some other kids aren’t going to college,” he said. “They’re doing great things in other industries, and we want to try to promote that and work with the spectrum of kids that really need the help in these small communities.”
No matter what other goals Graves achieves, he said his greatest accomplishment is being married to Sharolyn for 33 years, raising their three boys, and getting through eleven years of putting their children through college.
“That was an extreme feat that I feel was pretty rough to get through, but we all got through it,” Graves said.
When the couple adopted their young daughter, Graves said they have started the whole process over again, along with the addition of three grandchildren.
He doesn’t seem to mind, though.
“It’s just kids all over the place all the time,” he said. “It’s a blast.”
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