WILLOW CREEK — This week the Gazette published a special supplement marking approximately one hundred years since Ezra Thorne first scouted the Willow River crossing, a journey that would lead to the founding of Thorne & Sons Shipworks and the creation of Willow Creek itself.
Compiled from interviews with William Thorne and his son Ezra Thorne II, the supplement traces the family’s history from Ezra Thorne’s arrival in the 1790s through the launching of the yard’s first vessel to the final closing in 1891.
William Thorne, now seventy-two and in fragile health, provided the family’s oral history, including the story of how Nathaniel Thorne walked from Willow Creek to Bath in 1816 to study shipbuilding, returning with a notebook full of sketches. “The notebook is still in the family,” Thorne said. “It is kept in a tin box in the front parlor. The ink has faded, but the drawings are still clear.”
The supplement also traces the family’s relationship with the railroad. The Bangor & Aroostook line reached Willow Creek in 1884, and within three years, the yard had stopped building new vessels. The Lydia Barnes, launched in 1882, was the last.
“My father believed the railroad would never replace the river,” Ezra Thorne II recalled. “He was right about the cost, but wrong about the future. The railroad came, and the river shipping died. It was that simple.”
The supplement survives in full at the town library’s bound collection. Copies are available at the Gazette office for ten cents.