John Van Horn

Emma C. Berry in Photographs John Van Horn

The Emma C. Berry is celebrating her 150th birthday this year. She has resided at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut for nearly a third of her life, restored to how the shipwrights and craftsmen built her in 1866 in Noank, just a few miles down the Mystic River. During her first hundred years she led an interesting and varied life as she traveled up and down the Atlantic coast. Prior to arriving back on the Mystic River, Emma was a fishing smack, a lobster and fishing schooner, a freight vessel and pleasure yacht. In 1973 I inherited and became the caretaker of F. Slade Dale's black and white photo and negative collection. Slade became Emma's owner in 1931 and had kept her afloat, sometimes barely, for nearly forty years until he donated her to Mystic Seaport in 1967. He was one of the great yachtsmen of his generation, and combined his love of the water with a successful business in the sales, docking and maintenance of boats in Bay Head, New Jersey. During his ownership of Emma, she was used for sailing with his friends, and on two occasions she hauled cargo for his boat business. And she was always a point of interest at Dale Yacht Basin. This book covers only the first ten years of Slade's ownership of Emma (1931-1941)-the years when he sailed her most actively