The Casandra Adams

One of my great great grandfathers was a ship's carver and ship chandler in San Francisco in the mid to late 1800's. He took wood carving commissions while working his main job of outfitting ships with supplies and such. I had been told that one of his figureheads was located in a museum in San Francisco. Years ago I tried to locate where. As it turned out, the figurehead ended up in New Jersey. 

This particular great great grandfather was named Edward B. Lovejoy, who left Maine under suspicious circumstances in the early1840's. He made his way to San Francisco and became an original "49er" just prior to the Gold Rush. He set up a ship chandlery shop and as a sideline, carved wood on commission. I have a table carved by him. It's tad beat but still beautiful. He was a master craftsman.

A local shipping magnate, a Mr. Adams, commissioned my grandfather to carve the figurehead in the likeness of his daughter, Cassandra. It would ride loud and proud on the bow sprit of his newly built  bark (barque), the Cassandra Adams. When Mr. Adams saw the finished product, he was aghast, mortified; really pissed off I imagine. His daughter's likeness was clothed in a dress that stopped above her knees. 

The righteous indignation must have been awesome to behold. Proper ladies did not show their knees to anyone back then, especially on the bow sprit of a ship. Adams refused the figurehead and commissioned another one, more in line with the moral spirit of the day; fully clothed and not dressed as a harlot, thank you very much.

The shunned figurehead sat gathering dust in my great great grandfather Lovejoy's shop until a visitor from New Jersey stopped in. Probably doing a tourist run through the docks of San Francisco at the time. He was so taken with the figurehead, he bought it and had it shipped back to New Jersey, where it supposedly resides in someone's garden today.

It is a very rare figurehead, as most of them did end up on ships. Working wooden ships from the 1800's did not usually last long. They sank or ran aground quite often as did the Cassandra Adams on its way to Tacoma, Washington in 1888.

How I stumbled onto this story all started with a promotional pocket dictionary from an other great grandfather's feed, seed, and coal store  in Germantown, Pennsylvania around 1904, the year before my father was born. But that's another tale.

Keep it 'tween the ditches ..............................................

NOTE - The Cassandra part of the story comes from the Facebook page of "The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park".

NOTE 2 - I just found out there is a watercolor painting of the Cassandra figurehead at the National Gallery of Art. It is currently not on display, but hey I'm getting some vicarious pleasure from being related to this master carver, my great great grandfather Lovejoy.

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Now, what to pick for music? This musical add on is becoming harder to come up with than the posts. I'll shelve this for the night and revisit it tomorrow when I am ...........

I tried to remember a specific sea shanty we sang in music class in grade school. I really liked that tune and even now, I occasionally find myself humming it. Of course when I want to dig it up from the memory banks, it is nowhere to be found.

Instead, here is a very well done version of "Wellerman", by Nathan Evans.