Shelburne Dory Shop Museum celebrates 40th anniversary
SHELBURNE, NS — Benefactors came from far and wide to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Shelburne Dory Shop Museum on June 16.
While the event was somewhat bittersweet with the news that veteran shipbuilder Milford Buchanan would retire this year, that didn’t detract from the festivities and good-natured camaraderie between the Nova Scotia Museum’s sites, particularly the Dory Shop, the Fisheries Museum in Lunenburg and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax.
The Shelburne Dory Shop Museum was officially opened on June 16, 1983 by the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana.
An accomplished cabinetmaker, Buchanan began working at the Dory Shop Museum in May 1999, apprenticed to veteran boat builders Bill Cox and Curtis Mahaney.
“For the past 24 years, Milford has been the master boat builder. He has had skill, dedication and pride and it is no exaggeration to say that he has very few people in boat building when it comes to building wooden boats,” said Mike Hartigan, president of the Shelburne Historical Society. “He is our only living artifact here and one of our most prized possessions.”
Christine Sykora, Manager of Interpretation for the Nova Scotia Museum family of sites, recalled in 2000, when she was a newbie at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, that she was told to ask Buchanan which is better—a Shelburne-built sloop or one built in Lünenburg. She knew nothing of the longstanding rivalry between the Shelburne and Lunenburg shipbuilders over whose sloop is the best.
“We had a wind down with Clifton (a fellow wooden boat builder from the NS Museum) in 2010. We played a lot of little pranks at the international boat show,” said Buchanan. “He used to hide my fingernails, grease my hammer, we never found his plane. However, I later returned it to him.
In addition to Buchanan’s retirement, the anniversary celebration also included a first viewing of 10 new interpretation panels at the Dory Shop Museum, as well as an audio clip based on the Roving Fisherman, an autobiography by Frederick William Wallace, created by local volunteers Peter Healy, Pat Melanson and Jay Pilzer and written by Dory Shop heritage interpreter Brian Ogilvie.
Sykora said that despite the challenges of a global pandemic, the team has done a fantastic job creating the new interpretive panels.
“You can see the dedication, the passion and the perseverance they had… it looks beautiful.”
From May 29 to June 9, the Shelburne Dory Shop Museum hosted a team of American wooden boat builders who spent two weeks building and documenting a Shelburne sloop with Buchanan.
The team included Dory Shop Museum volunteer Mick Fearn; Graham McKay, Executive Director and Master Boatbuilder at Lowell’s Boat Shop, a working museum in Amesbury, MA and the oldest operating boat shop in America; Douglas Brooks, boat builder, documenter and expert on traditional Japanese wooden boats; Brad Dimock, boat builder and owner of Fretwater Boatworks in Flagstaff, AZ; and Cricket Rust, apprentice boat builder and shopkeeper at Fretwater Boatworks.
