This episode of "Inside Sailing with Peter Isler" we will visit one of the world's greatest maritime museum's - Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut. We will tour Mystic's Watercraft Hall - a private area where some of the museum's most significant treasures reside. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity - as the hall and its fleet of some of America's most special boats is closed to the public.
Founded in 1929 to gather and preserve the rapidly disappearing artifacts of America’s seafaring past, the Museum has grown to become a national center for research and education with the mission to “inspire an enduring connection to the American maritime experience.”
The Museum’s grounds cover 19 acres on the Mystic River in Mystic, CT and include a recreated 19th century coastal village, a working shipyard, formal exhibit halls, and state-of-the-art artifact storage facilities. The Museum is home to more than 500 historic watercraft, including four National Historic Landmark vessels, most notably the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial ship still in existence.
What Makes The Mystic Seaport Museum Special?
- A non-profit 501(c)3 organization, the Museum hosts 250,000 visitors annually and has an active membership base of 12,000 from all over the world.
- A stroll through the historic village transports visitors back to the mid-1800s where they can experience first hand from staff historians, storytellers, musicians, and craftspeople just what life was like to earn ones living from the sea.
- In the Henry B. DuPont Preservation Shipyard, they can watch shipwrights keeping the skills and techniques of traditional shipbuilding alive as they restore and maintain the Museum’s watercraft collection.
- The Museum’s 41, 000 sq. ft. Collections Research Center (CRC) offers exceptional physical and electronic access to more than 2 million artifacts. The collections range from marine paintings, scrimshaw, models, tools, ships plans, an oral history archive, extensive film and video recordings, and more than 1 million photographs—including the incomparable Rosenfeld Collection.
- The CRC is also home to the G.W. Blunt White Library, a 75,000-volume research library where scholars from around the world come to study America’s maritime history.
After this episode you will want to make the Mystic Seaport Museum your next vacation destination!
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