Sebago & The WoodenBoat School
A Shared Commitment to Tradition,
Craftsmanship, and Life on the Water
On a quiet stretch of Maine’s coast tucked into the village of Brooklin is one of the most unique schools in the country. It’s unique for several reasons, not the least of which being that it’s the only school known to us that was founded as an extension of a magazine, something practically unimaginable in the 21st century. But this idiosyncratic streak doesn’t stop there, the lessons here go back beyond the heyday of print.This school teaches craftsmanship and skills from a more seafaring era, a time of sail and sea and wooden boats.
The aptly named WoodenBoat School was founded in 1981 with the mission of providing access to “experience in wooden boat construction, maintenance, repair, design, seamanship and related crafts.” Perhaps inelegant, though It sounds simple enough, until you stop to consider that in 1981, let alone today, you and I most likely can’t think of a single person who could fix and maintain a wooden boat, let alone build one from scratch. It didn’t used to be like that. Just two or three generations ago, craftsmanship, tradition and community helped to make the building, launching, sailing and care of wooden ships the lifeblood and heart of coastal towns all across the US—and Maine especially. With the threat of the loss of that heritage, the WoodenBoat School stepped into an educational role that preserves a way of life through tradition, craftsmanship and quality.
To reconnect people with that tradition, the WoodenBoat School focuses on re-immersing them in that community, but first, like all good schools, they had to create it. On their beautiful sixty-plus acre saltwater campus, they offer access not just to the beauty of Maine’s wild coast, but to a hub of craftsmen, makers, teachers and above all, doers. This is a hands-on place. You build, you sail, you work with tools and you work on the water. This living campus fosters the connections of this nascent community of students, forged out of shared workshops, communal meals, and class time that builds out the social fabric of the community, which in turn helps move forward the living tradition of woodworking and boatbuilding.
This thriving community in turn serves as a catalyst of craftsmanship. After all, at its heart, the WoodenBoat School is about craftsmanship as a way of life. Their course offerings cover a huge range of skills, crafts and techniques, from strip-plank boat construction, to seamanship courses, to carving, to full restorations. Participants range from complete novices to veteran, practicing craftsmen, and learning is scaled with different course lengths and projects both large and small. The resulting hive of knowledge and activity is built by prioritizing traditional techniques and careful craftsmanship with an emphasis on quality. In a world of mass production, the school offers something rare: the chance to slow down, to shape something tangible, to work with tools and materials that demand patience and care.
At Sebago, these same traditions, this same commitment to craftsmanship, runs through everything we do. For nearly 80 years we’ve been outfitting Maine and the world with quality crafted shoes and clothing grounded in tradition, quality and a connection to the place we’re from. It doesn’t get more simple than that. To attend the WoodenBoat School is to step into a rhythm shaped by these forces and nurtured by community. For many, the experience is transformative. Students often describe leaving not only with new skills, but with a renewed sense of connection: to tradition, to craft, to the Maine landscape, and to themselves. And while it won’t teach you to build a peapod by hand from scratch, or improve your seamanship all that much, we still like to think that slipping on a pair of Sebago shoes can help make that same connection, at least in a small way.
