timber. Sawmills were erected on the island, and a supply of the finest quality of ship timber was created, and brought by the Erie Canal to tidewater, thence by coasting vessels to East Boston. This attracted ship-builders from other towns, and eventually made Boston a famous ship-building centre. Stephen White owned the first ship built in East Boston, the Niagara, of 460 tons, appropriately named after the river from which the timber used in her construction had come. She was built in 1834, by Brown, Bates & Delano in their yard at the foot of Central Square, and was launched amid an uproar of guns, fire-crackers, shouts, and music, with a bottle of good Medford rum trickling down her port bow.
The first Boston ferry-boats, the East Boston, Essex, and Maverick, were built at East Boston in 1834–35, but nothing further was done in shipbuilding there until 1839, when Samuel Hall a well-known builder, of Marshfield and Duxbury, removed to East Boston and established a yard at the west end of Maverick Street. Mr. Hall not only contributed to the reputation and welfare of East Boston by building a large number of splendid vessels and providing employment for a great number of men, but he was also active in all municipal affairs. In appreciation of his successful efforts for the introduction of Cochituate water into East Boston in 1851, his fellow-citizens presented him with a thousand-dollar service of plate, consisting of eleven pieces, with the usual inscription, with which most of us are more or less familiar.
The Briggs Brothers, of South Boston, came from
