Greenport Maritime Festival

A century and one year ago, a young North Forker named Alvah Goldsmith, the son of Peconic farmers from a family that settled the North Fork in the 1600s, bought a new kind of tiny motor for his rowboat.

He was working at one of the area’s fledgling auto repair shops and had a knack for motors and an affinity for boats, so he was drawn to the idea of outfitting his small skiff with a new invention that had made it possible to retrofit a small dory with a motor light enough to be carried by one man.

He saved up and bought one of these “outboard” motors and was so taken by it that he wrote a letter of congratulations to the owner of the company that made it — Ole Evinrude.

A few weeks later Evinrude — who is credited with having made the first general application outboard motors — wrote back. He proposed that the young mechanic become a retail dealer of his motors.

“All you had to do in those days to be a dealer was buy one more motor,” Glenn Goldsmith, Alvah’s grandson, said with a chuckle, sitting in the offices of Goldsmith’s Boat Yard in Southold, which got its start when his grandfather bought that second engine and put it up for sale on his front porch.

Evinrude stopped making new motors in 2020, but Goldsmith’s Boat Yard, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, is still officially the oldest Evinrude dealership.

Goldsmith’s is also recognized in the industry as the oldest continuously operation boatyard in the nation.

Three generations of Goldsmiths — Alvah Goldsmith’s son Alvah “Skip” Goldsmith Jr., his grandsons Glenn and Craig, and Glenn’s sons Reid and Landon — work at the boatyard now and are the grand marshals of this year’s Maritime Festival.

Alvah Goldsmith Sr.’s side-gig selling Evinrudes from his parents’ porch, then their barn, then a storefront in Peconic had become a full-fledged business of its own by 1930, when he bought a waterfront property in Founders Landing in Southold and started a new boat shop that sold his Evinrude motors and hand-crafted wooden canoes and boats.

“Recreational boating was in its infancy then and he was kind of a pioneer out here,” Glenn Goldsmith said. “A lot of the marinas here trace their history back to him, people that worked for him or that he helped get started. Albertson’s, Ulrich’s, Dickerson’s Marine, Port of Egypt. There wasn’t a recreational marine industry on the North Fork before him.”

When World War II broke out, Alvah Sr. took his boat shop’s catalog of skills to the U.S. Navy, offering to help the war effort.

“They had boats in the Pacific that were failing because they were using inferior products and he said he could build a good boat,” Skip Goldsmith, now 83, said. “He had to go to Whitehall Street and talk to the Navy representatives. After five or six trips they gave him the go-ahead.”

Goldsmith’s built 138 wooden hulls, 24- and 35-footers, to Navy specs for rearmament and crew boats to service the military seaplanes that played a critical role in the Pacific campaign.

The boats were designed to ferry torpedoes, supplies and personnel to the seaplanes, which couldn’t easily dock or link up with supply ships.

The boats stood up to the rigors of war, and beyond. In the 1980s, Skip Goldsmith got a letter from a fisherman in California who had stumbled on a boat in a local fleet with a metal keel plate stamped with the Goldsmith’s seal and dated 1944.

After the war, the recreational boating on the East End boomed, and so did Goldsmith’s.

In 1946 Alvah bought a 17-acre former brickyard up the bay whose clay excavation pits had flooded in the 1938 hurricane and left two large, deep basins connected to Shelter Island Sound by a small inlet.

Goldsmith’s shifted from boat manufacturing to selling, servicing and berthing the growing number of boat brands and motors coming onto the market.

Goldsmith’s now has 110 boat slips and is still one of the premier service and sales shops in the region — selling Yamaha outboards and Scout boats.

Glenn and Craig Goldsmith, who are both in their mid-40s, run the marina now and say the business shows no signs of waning. With Glenn’s sons already working at the boatyard, Goldsmith’s clearly has a lot more years of being the oldest boatyard in business still.

“We have a good run left in us,” Craig said. “The boating industry is doing pretty well, especially since COVID when everyone went out and bought a boat.”

The biggest headwinds may be some of the same things facing many businesses in the region.

“The industry is going to change here at some point,” Craig said. “We don’t see a lot of the younger generation coming into the service business. Most of our guys are in their 50s, and there aren’t a lot of young guys filling in to take their place.”

His brother, who is the president of the Southold Town Trustees, the colonial-era board that oversees town waters and bay bottoms, said that sea-level rise is posing increasing challenges at the marina and across the North Fork.

“The peninsula that protects us is almost gone, so now on a southwest wind waves are going over it, causing erosion and banging up the docks so we have to build that up,” Glenn said. “We have to sink more and more money into just keeping the operation going, so there are some challenges.

“But then you think back to my grandfather’s day,” he added. “He went through the Great Depression and World War II, so it’s hard for us to complain.”