On Feb. 11, 1902, the largest schooner ever built on the Mystic River was launched at the Holmes Shipbuilding Company (now Mystic Shipyard). Built to Lloyds of London specifications at a cost of $100,000 (over $3 million today), she was a five-masted, 249-foot behemoth, 46 feet wide with a 20-foot draft, 5-inch planking, 108-foot masts and 56-foot topmasts, and a 50-foot bowsprit and 76-foot jibboom. She was named the Jennie R. Dubois.

She was said at the time to be the “best vessel ever built in the state,” designed to carry freight – mostly coal and lumber. Schools and local stores were closed for the gala occasion, trains stopped at the nearby station, and over 6,000 showed up for the christening and launch, with Jennie Dubois herself (wife of a Rhode Island Supreme Court justice) performing the honors with champagne and an awful poem she had penned herself.

Perhaps this was an omen – Jennie was married, and vessels christened by married women were considered unlucky (Jennie herself faded into obscurity). In any case, gaily bedecked with colorful pennants, she slid off the rails at her launching so smoothly she “wouldn’t have cracked an egg.”

She drenched the spectators with seawater as she entered the river, and promptly became firmly moored in the Mystic mud. It took the stiff winds of a blustery snowstorm before she could be floated off.

Thereafter, she began her life as a cargo ship routinely enough (notwithstanding getting stuck in shallow waters regularly) – hauling thousands of pounds of coal and up to 2 million feet of timber up and down the northeast seaboard.

Then, on the night of Sept. 5, 1903, the Jennie Dubois was sailing along in the fog on its way into Boston from Philadelphia, carrying a load of coal. Just southeast of Block Island, she was suddenly rammed by a German tramp steamer lately having made a long transit from Calcutta, and coming now out of Boston.

The tramp steamer sheared the bow off the Dubois just forward of the anchor locker. The bow sank like a stone to the bottom of the sea with her anchors and foremast, which was snapped off. The hull continued to drift NNE for a quarter of a mile before the remainder of this magnificent schooner sank. As the hull drifted, the anchor chain was pulled out of its locker and is now stretched out in a perfectly straight line on the bottom for 600 feet (this points to her final resting place).

The next morning was a dense foggy one, and the Southeast Lighthouse keeper on Block Island sent out a rescue crew, having heard whistles during the night. As day broke, he saw four masts protruding in the waters. They found only a black cat surviving, presumably clinging to one of those masts.

Unbeknownst to the lighthouse rescue crew, that same German steamer who had rammed the Dubois had lowered her lifesaving boats and picked up the 11 shipmates “in nothing but what they stood in.” They were being transported at that very moment to New York City where they were “deposited without a nickel between them.”

Two days later the New London Day reported the sinking of an unidentified vessel, with no trace of crew or wreckage.

Slowly the story came out. In a scene not unlike something out of Russell Crowe’s “Master and Commander,” Captain Smeed aboard the Jennie Dubois had seen the German steamer coming in and out of the fog all night long. Although the schooner had sounded her foghorns continually, she had not altered course – sailing ships having the right-of-way then as now.

Every sail was set on the ship. Capt. Smeed had maintained his course (he would have been held responsible for the collision if he hadn’t) ... but as ill luck would have it, the German steamer didn’t alter its course either, and when it rammed the Jennie Dubois, it sliced her in two.

It was during a change of watch, however, and this accounted for the miraculous survival of all crew members.

Later, the sunken wreck’s towering masts were deemed a ‘hazard to navigation’ by the Army Corps of Engineers – being directly in the track of north and southbound ship traffic to and from New York City. And so, the Navy blasted them to smithereens with guncotton.

Block Islanders remembered it as “like an earthquake.” Later, River Pilot “Tal” Dodge went down on the wreck to see if he could salvage anything of value – sails, masts, etc.

From a newspaper article at the time: “The pilot has secured 100 lbs of dynamite, and will use it, if necessary, to start the big spars out of the wreck… Unless the cabin has been burst open by the action of the water, there is a good chance of getting the valuable nautical instruments, and possibly a large amount of money which Captain Smeed was unable to save before the schooner took her final dive to Davy Jones’ locker.”

The Jennie Dubois was reported to have a luxurious Captain’s Cabin — thick Brussels carpets, steam heating (in the wheelhouse and forecastle, too), a modern bathroom, and gleaming wood. (To get a sense of what the Captain’s Quarters might have looked like, visit the Benjamin Packard exhibit at Mystic Seaport.).

No word on whether Dodge ever reached the cash, or the nautical instruments before he lit off his dynamite.

For over 100 years, the remains of the largest ship ever built here lay hidden and lost. Then, in 2007, a local consortium (Sound Underwater Survey and Baccala Wreck Divers) got busy using towed side-scan sonar aboard the 42-foot Baccala. The team searched for five years using data from old newspapers, the National Archives, the Southeast Light’s notes, and even old “hang” sites – sites of notorious fishermen’s net losses.

All told, for five years they scanned over 17 square miles. In 2007, they decided to dive on an area that looked ‘odd’ on the side-scan sonar. And when they did …

There she was … they had found her – the largest ship ever built on the Mystic River, and built right here on Willow Point.

What the divers subsequently found and identified were her anchors, lengths of her anchor chain (pointing along the bottom to the hull), portions of her lead-lined scuppers, pieces of the keelson, hoistings engine, bilge pump, and hull sections and ribs. Except for the dynamiting, and the fact that she was stripped of as much as could be salvaged soon after the wreck, more might have been found.

The discovery was duly announced in 2008, and today the deep wreck site is popular with serious divers, and the discoverers also regularly dive on it. Mark Munro of Sound Underwater Survey has found a brass drifting pin that he now intends to mount and give to Mystic Shipyard.

What we know as Willow Point’s Mystic Shipyard today had many iterations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Starting out as the Forsyth Wharf in 1843, it began a heyday of shipbuilding under the firm Maxson, Fish & Co., starting in 1853 and continuing during the Civil War. It was also called at this time the Oldfields Shipyard, after the original name given to what we now call Willow Point – probably from the fact that the Pequots had used this land for growing corn during the summer months.

(William Ellery Maxson built the large yellow house that stands today at the corner of School Street and the end of West Mystic Avenue, and he eventually bought the house built by another of the firm’s owners, William Barber, standing today at the north corner of Maxson and Essex Streets).

During the Civil War, the Maxson, Fish & Co. shipyard here built many ships, including 14 steam vessels – the most famous being the ironclad screw steamer Galena, which was ordered by the government along with Ironsides and Monitor, and saw action against the Confederate Navy. They also built the beautiful Seminole, which made many trips ‘round Cape Horn, and whose striking figurehead is now on display at Mystic Seaport.

Maxson, Fish & Co., went into receivership in the late 1860s, and was reorganized by Maxson and Alexander Irving. Eventually the yard became the Holmes Shipbuilding Company, sometimes seen on maps identified as the Holmes Engine Company. William K. Holmes was from Wall Street.

Only a few of the homes now on Willow Point date from this era, as so many were swept away or otherwise destroyed in the Hurricane of ‘38. The Holmes Shipyard and the Jennie Dubois were part of the revival of shipbuilding that saw many very large ships built here around the turn of the last century.

Photos of the Jennie Dubois’ construction line the walls in the shipyard’s offices today – I’m sure they won’t mind if you go in to have a look.

The master-builder had been Willard Avery Hodgkins of Bath, Maine. As she was designed to haul mostly coal, coastal schooners like the Jennie Dubois were the “oil tankers” of their day, used to fuel homes and industry, and were relied upon as much as we rely on oil tankers today.

Thanks go to Mark Munro of Sound Underwater Surveys for his help with this article.

G.S. Casale is president of the Willow Point Association in Groton.