Wiscasset's Steve Erskine said his grandfather Roy B. Rowe and Rowe's brothers Clarke and Frank started Eastern Steamship Company and owned the Winter Harbor and another steamboat. Winter Harbor did the Boothbay-Wiscasset mail run with over 100 passengers aboard, Erskine, of Wiscasset, said. He told Wiscasset Newspaper Sept. 24, Route 27’s paving “gradually put them out of business.” He has a logbook he said shows a Boothbay-Wiscasset trip with seven passengers. 

Its income lost to the changing times, Erskine said the Winter Harbor was tied up “just abaft on the port side” of the Luther Little, which, along with its fellow four-masted schooner Hesper, became Wiscasset’s oft-captured image of two vessels in their final resting place.

The Rowe brothers could not afford Winter Harbor’s repairs and they “just left it abandoned,” Erskine said. “And then she went to the bottom in a hurricane, and that was history," Erskine said. 

Not quite history for the Winter Harbor’s propeller, however.

Wiscasset author and Wiscasset Newspaper news contributor and columnist Phil Di Vece wrote in his book "Wiscasset And Its Times," divers cut off and brought up the propeller in 1978. 

In last week's interview, Erskine recalled when, several years ago, friend Sidney Gammon was Wiscasset’s harbor master. “He said ‘Your granddad’s propeller is stored down at the storage locker and I’ve been told to clean out the locker, so would you like to have it?’ And then I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to have it.’” Erskine considered it a “piece of Wiscasset history,” and wanted to preserve it. 

Erskine worked at Bath Iron Works then and the company, he said, was going to soda-blast the propeller and put a preservative on it. “I had a group of 10 people and we were going to build an informational kiosk down at the waterfront, (telling) a little about the Winter Harbor and … Hesper and the Luther Little,” and return the propeller for display there.

He said publicity about the propeller’s being out of town hands led to the end of that prospect and the propeller went back to the town before it could be worked on. 

Sept. 15, Steve Christiansen — known to Wiscasset Newspaper readers as a great resource in Phil Di Vece’s Salt ‘n Spar columns — told Wiscasset selectmen the old steel propeller, now sitting unpreserved at the waterfront, is "slowly eating itself to death."  Christiansen said the Winter Harbor owner’s grandson (Erskine) told him he’d still like to improve the propeller’s condition for the town. 

As this was the public comment portion, selectmen made no comment. Erskine told Wiscasset Newspaper he plans to talk with Town Manager Dennis Simmons about the idea.

Christiansen told Wiscasset Newspaper Sept. 22, when he was a kid, he could, in extreme low tides, see the Winter Harbor's ribwork. He said he has always known Erskine. Their fathers worked together at Mason Station.

"Hopefully, (this) will come to fruition," Christiansen said of the possible work on the propeller. "It's kind of sitting there rusting into oblivion ... I just think it's nice of Steve to want to do that."

Why does Christiansen like sharing Wiscasset's history, whether with Phil Di Vece for a column, or at a selectmen's meeting? Christiansen explained, his family goes back 290 years in Wiscasset. As a kid, he'd often look at Fanny Chase's book, "Wiscasset in Pownalborough." He has his great grandmother's copy she received as a Christmas gift in 1941.

"So I was always interested in stuff in Wiscasset, from my great grandmother's perspective. And my mother has a pretty good memory of stuff, and so I've just had an interest ... only because I've been here for so darn long. And I just think history is important, and I like talk in about it, and I've got a lot of stuff," he added. 

Erskine is one of the captains on Maine's First Ship's the Virginia. He said he's a 40-year member of Wiscasset Yacht Club and that his roots run deep in the Boothbay area. "It's in my blood, and it means a lot to me."

Erskine said his mother Priscilla Rowe became, in 1949, the fifth female ever on the East Coast to get a hundred-ton captain’s license. At 12, she was captain of a 28-foot swampscott dorey taking people to Squirrel and Cabbage islands, Erskine said. 

Erskine also recalled the late Ruth Applin, a Wiscasset Boston Post Cane honoree, telling him her senior class trip was on the Winter Harbor. He said she told him two seniors got a couple of empty pint bottles out of the trash and put ice tea in them; the two were up on the forecastle sipping when Erskine's grandfather, a "teetotaler ... grabbed them away from them and threw (the bottles) overboard and said 'I won't have any drinking on my boat.'"