National Treasures

Harold Burnham and his hand-built ships are the living embodiment of a New England town’s traditions.

- Laurie Schreiber

Paul Revere’s bell hangs in the tower above the 18th-century First Congregational Church in Essex, Massachusetts. Near-by, the 82-ton Evelina M. Goulart — an original, Essex-built schooner from 1927 — looms as a decayed apparition in the yard of the Essex Shipbuilding Museum. The wonder that surrounds them both makes it easy to miss the H.A. Burnham shipbuilding yard altogether.

Tucked along a residential lane, the yard is a peaceful place that tumbles down a slope to the water’s edge. Finding it feels a bit like stumbling upon a junkyard: In addition to piles of live-edge lumber, there’s a rusted fuel tank loaded with wood scraps, mooring balls, truck tires, cement blocks and foam bedding. The giveaways that this is the right spot are the sawmill and a pile of logs at the top of the slope. Water, wood and marsh muffle the sounds of hammering amid several wooden boats on jack stands.

“The yard is in full splendor right now,” yard owner Harold Burnham says with a deadpan tone.

Wearing Carhartt pants, a blue flannel shirt and black deck shoes — all begrimed with an honest life’s hard work — Burnham gives opposing impressions. One is of a person more comfortable with lumber than people, but who has learned to soliloquize for the public’s benefit. The other is a man of quiet humor, one with much expressed appreciation for everything in his life, from culture and community to friends and mentors.

He launches into the latter, talking about Essex, a topic that deeply engages him as a boat builder and a descendant of the area’s first settlers.