Faces from Duxbury’s Past: George Loring

Spring 2005 

In this issue we are pleased to feature another portrait that has recently been acquired by the Society.  In April, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Colatrella generously donated a fine charcoal portrait of Deacon George Loring of Duxbury (1770-1847).  Loring was an energetic and influential figure during Duxbury’s shipbuilding era and his portrait is therefore a significant addition to our collection.

Those who have seen the portrait are struck by its extremely lifelike quality and frequently ask how it was made.  The consensus among the Collections Committee, with advice from Terry Vose of Vose Galleries, is that the image was most likely made with a camera obscura. 

This device, literally translated as “darkened room,” was the predecessor to photographic cameras.  It consisted of a lens mounted on a small box.  Aided by mirrors, the lens projected a detailed image of whatever was before it onto an artist’s easel.  Artists would then trace the projection and later, if desired, add color.  The result was a remarkably true-to-life image only one step removed from a photograph.  The portrait was probably made about 1830, at which time the use of the camera obscura was fairly common.

Loring ran a small but successful shipyard just west of the Bluefish River Bridge.  Given the narrow size of the Bluefish River near the bridge, vessels launched from Loring’s yard would almost always plow into the opposite bank sometimes requiring quite a bit of work to dig them out.

He built vessels for Boston merchants, particularly Charles Binney, but also retained some of the vessels he built, sharing ownership with other Duxbury merchants.  Among others, he built and operated the brigs Africa, built in 1823, and Panama, built in 1826, at 253 tons his largest vessel.  He also shared ownership of a schooner, the Collector, with Ezra Weston, “King Caesar.”

His son, George B. Loring, reminisced about his father’s shipyard, “To my youthful ear the sound of a hundred hammers in the early morning hours, when a day’s labor began…was a music which I can never forget, and which we shall probably never hear again.  A Duxbury ship was to me a barge of beauty, and whatever the achievements made in naval architecture, the names of Sampson, and Weston, and Drew, and Frazar, and Loring, and Winsor will outshine, in my mind, all the McKays and Curriers and Halls that ever launched a ship on the Merrimac…The music of those hammers is still.  The old shipyard where I used to play, not a chip, or a timber, or spar, or plank there, but a luxiariant greensward where grass is growing for cattle, and herb for the service of man.” 

[ Home ] [ Up ]

Send mail to pbrowne@duxburyhistory.org with questions or comments about this web site.