GREENVILLE, Maine — The historic steamboat, The Katahdin, is undergoing the first of many restoration projects to restore the iconic Greenville attraction.
A crew from the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard is currently replacing the 100-year-old boat's rear upper deck, which is the steamboat's primary seating area. On Monday, the crew was assembling deck beams and is expected to have the deck installation completed by Memorial Day weekend.
"We hope that this boat is going to continue on well into the century. She's over 100 years old and she's like, the one constant thing over the last century in Greenville," Liz McKeil, the Moosehead Marine Museum's executive director, said.
The Katahdin will undergo preservation work in the off-seasons of the next four years or so. McKeil said the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard will eventually replace its port and starboard decks and will haul the boat out of the water to sandblast and paint the hull. In the final year of preservation, it will replace a structural rail that separates the upper and lower cabins.
"We're doing something very meaningful and we're very passionate about it," the project manager from Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, Eric Graves, said.
Graves often works on historical vessels, and said he appreciates the historical aspect of this project, especially what it means to the Greenville community.
"It's been great to work on a historic period vessel that's retained in this area forever. Locked in by the lake, it originally came from BIW [Bath Iron Works] in three sections and assembled on the beach and then finished up by carpenters," Graves said. "Just that history and knowing that we're still a part of living history, putting the vessel back very accurately to how she is and how she was."
The Katahdin is an "economic engine" for the Greenville community, McKeil said. About 8,000 visitors cruise Moosehead Lake onboard The Katahdin every year.
"She's not only a symbol of our past, but she's a beacon of hope for our future," McKeil said. A future in which she'll continue being a symbol in the community.
The preservation work will cost about $2 million and hopefully, McKeil said, it won't need any other restoration work for another 25 years.
The Katahdin was built in 1914 and worked on Moosehead Lake as part of the Coburn Steamboat Company and Hollingsworth Whitney and Scott Paper before retiring in 1975, according to a release. In 1979, the boat was entered on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Moosehead Marine Museum restored the steamboat and made it a cruise attraction on the lake in 1986, a release said.