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Kings County (barque)

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History
Canada
NameKings County
OwnerWilliam Thompson, Saint John, New Brunswick
Port of registryWindsor, Nova Scotia
BuilderC.R. Burgess Yard, Kingsport, Nova Scotia
LaunchedJune 2, 1890
Identification
  • Code Letters LWBF
  • [1]
FateWrecked 1911
General characteristics
Tonnage2061 Gross Tons
Length255 ft.
Beam45 ft.
Depth25 ft.
Decks2
PropulsionSail
Sail planFour Masted Barque

Kings County was a four-masted barque built in 1890 at Kingsport, Nova Scotia on the Minas Basin. She was named to commemorate Kings County, Nova Scotia and represented the peak of the county's shipbuilding era. (A much smaller barque also named Kings County had been built in 1871.) Kings County was one of the largest wooden sailing vessels ever built in Canada and one of only two Canadian four-masted barques. (The other was the slightly smaller John M. Blaikie of Great Village, Nova Scotia.) At first registered as a four masted full rigged ship, she was quickly changed to a barque after her June 2 launch.[2] More than three thousand people from Kings and Hants counties attended the launch. She survived a collision with an iceberg on an 1893 voyage to Swansea, Wales. Like many of the large wooden merchant ships built in Atlantic Canada, she spent most of her career far from home on trading voyages around the world. In 1909, she returned to the Minas Basin for a refit at Hantsport and loaded a large cargo of lumber. In 1911 she became the largest wooden ship to enter Havana Harbour when she delivered a cargo of lumber and was briefly stranded. She was lost a few months later on a voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay when she ran aground in the River Plate.[3] Too damaged to repair, she was scrapped in Montevideo where her massive timbers were visible for many years.

References

  1. ^ Lloyd's Register 1910
  2. ^ St. Clair Patterson, Hantsport Shipbuilding: 1849-1893, Hantsport: Tug Boat Publishing, 2008, p. 108.
  3. ^ Cora Atkinson, A History of Kingsport (1980)
  • Tom Sheppard, Historic Wolfville: Grand Pre and Countryside, Halifax: Nimbus, 2003, p. 150-151.
  • Charles Armour and Thomas Lackey, Sailing Ships of the Maritime, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975, p. 180
  • Frederick William Wallace, In the Wake of the Windships, (London, 1927), p. 223-224.

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