A Brief Ferry Sloops History - By Lenny Lipton

Back in the 60’s when the Hudson River was very polluted and dirty there were people like Pete Seeger who looked on the river with sadness. They knew the potential beauty of the Hudson River Valley and longed for it to be returned to a clean state of being so that people could enjoy swimming, boating, and gazing upon it.

Pete had read a book by two old Hudson River sloop captains, Collier and Verplanck, and he had an inspiration- if he could have a replica sloop built and sailed it on the river then it might move people to help clean the river up.

After much hard work fund raising the Clearwater was built at Harvey Gamage’s yard in Maine. Clearwater sailed up and down the Hudson, attracting attention and helping to spread the word of the environmental movement. The Clearwater proved so popular and successful at focusing attention on the state of the river that Pete and others decided that local sloop clubs, which would operate out of one fixed location, would be a valuable addition to the movement.

Pete had a smaller boat built of wood, named it the Woody Guthrie, and sailed it with the Beacon Sloop Club. In that era a material called ferro-cement, a type of reinforced concrete, was very popular as an amateur boat building material. People thought that it would be quick and easy to build boats out of this material (in fact it is neither- boat building is hard work no matter how you slice it) and that a separate organization could be started to build boats for the Hudson River movement. The hull of what later became the Sojourner Truth was built professionally in Maryland and shipped up to Yonkers to be completed by the new group Ferry Sloops. It was indeed finished and sailed, but it took 5 years! After that no one else really wanted to build a boat, so other sloop clubs took the form of ‘Friends of Clearwater’ types of groups and Ferry Sloops was left to itself  to pursue its own course, and it developed into an all volunteer mini-Clearwater type of group much like the Beacon Sloop Club which had preceded it.