The serendipitous route one white oak took to reach the sea

More than 300 years ago, the township that would eventually become the city of Nashua began taking shape in the wilderness.

Around the same time, an acorn took root.

As the village grew, so did the tree. Together, tree and weathered dramatic events such as the American Revolution, both getting stronger and bigger by the year

The tree was part of a grove of white oaks near the area now known, appropriately enough, as Grove Street. When the Unitarian-Universalist Church on adjacent Lowell Street was built in 1827, some of the trees likely fell to the ax. More followed in 1835 to make way for the Nashua Cemetery, located behind the church.

The 1850s also took a toll on Nashua's white oaks, as many were harvested and sent to Boston shipyards to be transformed into the giant clipper ships being built to handle the Gold Rush and Chinese tea trades. The huge, square-rigged carried large volumes of high-valued cargo around continents very quickly.

But becoming a clipper ship was not this oak trees destiny.

For many years, it seemed as if the tree would stay safely land-bound in the cemetery. But 20 years ago, members of the Nashua Cemetery Commission began worrying about the mayhem the tree might cause in the future. It had already reached a diameter of about 5 1/2 feet, and the commission feared that its roots might knock over the stone wall on Grove Street.

It was decided that the tree had to go. While a mere stump now marks the place where it used to preside, the tree, thanks to Nashua resident Bob Sampson, escaped the chipper, transcended its possible fate as firewood and instead became a thing of beauty.

More about that in a moment.

Sampson, now 70, was cemetery treasurer back then. When he looked at the tree, sad as he was to see it go, he saw in it a future greatness, perhaps even a life at sea.

His vision for the oak was practically genetic. If you trace the Sampson line back four generations, you discover that his great-great-grandfather was a shipbuilder in Duxbury, Mass. His great-grandfather, George Thomas Sampson, was the "G.T." in A. & G.T. Sampson Ship Builders of East Boston - the same family who ordered timber from Nashua to be used in their clipper ships.

Sampson's grandfather was the chief marine engineer of Boston's ferries.

"My father was the first one who didn't have some professional connection with the sea and shipbuilding in God knows how many generations," Sampson said at his Sargent Avenue home.

"When my father, who grew up in Boston and was an electrical engineer, was offered a job in Nashua in the early 1900s, he remarked to his grandfather that he had been offered a job there, and old George T. said, 'Oh, I know Nashua well. I used to go up and order all my timber from Luther Roby.' That's my personal connection."

Given Sampson's family lineage, it seems only natural that as he stood appraising the white oak that threatened Nashua Cemetery, he would know, much as his great-grandfather did, that its strong, rot-resistant wood would make excellent ship-building material. It also seems only natural that he would know someone who still made wooden boats by hand, someone who might be interested in the tree.

He called Gordon Swift of Kensington. The two became friendly about 40 years ago, when "Swifty" was working in Dover Point for Bob McIntosh, a renowned and influential wooden-boat designer and builder. McIntosh just happened to be a neighbor of Sampson's grandfather.

Swift was definitely interested. He was teaching a summer boat-building class at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, and needed some wood to build a Friendship sloop. The challenge would be harvesting the longest possible logs from the Nashua tree while still being able to clear the cemetery's cast iron fence.

After a tree worker cut off all the branches, Swift managed to salvage two massive 16-foot logs from the tree, pieces that literally weighed tons. Even with the use of a crane, they barely cleared the fence.

"Everybody was praying," said Swift, 78, remembering the moment in his Kensington workshop, surrounded by the current projects "that keep him out of mischief".

Prayers were answered. While the tree's "knees," or bent limbs, found their way into the U.S.S. Constitution to be used as beam supports, Swift brought the rest of the wood to Maine. For two weeks each summer, for seven consecutive years, he and a small group of students transformed the oak into a Friendship sloop called the Belford Gray. Joel White, the naval architect son of author E.B. White, designed the boat.

The students were an eclectic group. Their ages ranged from 17 to 70 and members included the songwriter who penned "Don't it Make my Brown Eyes Blue?" Despite their diversity, they all became friends, drawn together by their love of the craft.

Friendship sloops get their name from a town in the Muscongus Bay area of Maine, where they were used as the "inshore lobster and fishing boat for the northern New England coast fisheries in the days before powerboats," Sampson said. "They are just beautiful and nifty sailors."

Although Swift was "scared to death" that the oak wouldn't bend into the necessary shapes after it was steamed, the wood turned out to be the best bending timber he's ever worked with

 Since its completion, the Belford Gray has been used by the WoodenBoat School to teach students how to sail. Everything in the sloop - its entire skeleton - came from the Nashua oak, except for the planking, which is cedar.

Thanks to an article in the December 2002 WoodenBoat magazine (which sponsors the school), Nashua residents can now view their tree in all of its reincarnated glory.

This tale of interwoven connections has a final kicker. Five years ago, Sampson and his son Daniel were enjoying a hike in Washington about 3,000 miles away from home.

Another hiker struck up a conversation, asking them where they were from. When he realized they were New Englanders, he told them about this class he had taken at the WoodenBoat School with a certain Gordon Swift. They had built a Friendship sloop together: In fact, Swift had told them a funny story about how he got the oak for their boat.

It all started when some guy called about an oak tree in a cemetery...