After the Civil War, the great wooden schooners—the Christmas tree ships—began to carry cut evergreen trees from the Maine woods to the bustling winter markets near the big city docks. These vessels were more than shippers; they were the lifelines of a holiday tradition.
Four schooners arrived from Maine carrying that first modest shipment—fewer than 6,000 trees. Yet, as demand exploded, the fleet struggled to keep pace. By 1905, there simply weren’t enough Christmas tree ships to satisfy the hunger for hundreds of thousands of cut trees destined for the festive hubs of Portland, Boston, New York, and Baltimore.
Newspaper illustration of a Maine woodchopper
The Christmas tree ships allowed Maine farmers and woodsmen to turn a nearly worthless but plentiful resource into a lucrative commodity. It sustained them through the lean winter season when they would otherwise go hunting. Then the expanding railroad network would allow New Hampshire and Vermont to ship their own cut trees from the interior.
The Christmas Tree Ships
A combination of post-war prosperity, massive immigration and the growing popularity of the Christmas celebration kept the fleet busy hauling trees from late November. It reigned until the inevitable rise of trucks and trains. By then, the old wooden schooners were becoming too costly to maintain, and the era of the Christmas tree ships gradually faded away.
But their legacy endures. It lives on in the majestic windjammers that now carry tourists along the rugged Maine coast each summer. And it is remembered solemnly on Lake Michigan, where an annual ceremony honors a beloved Christmas tree ship skipper who perished with his vessel in a storm.
The Emergence of the Christmas Tree
The changing American celebration of Christmas gave rise to the Christmas tree ships. In the 17th century, New England puritans banned Christmas. They viewed it as a rowdy, Papist celebration far removed from the family-centered holiday we know today. By the Civil War, Christmas was making a comeback. Charles Dickens’ 1843 story, “A Christmas Carol,” popularized a holiday that celebrated Christian values of kindness, charity and family. As the Civil War erupted, the “influencers” of the day—ladies’ magazines—promoted the Christmas tree as a cherished family ritual.
Immigration also reshaped American Christmas customs. German immigrants, in particular, brought with them traditions like the decorated Tannenbaum. At the same time, people were migrating to cities in droves. Between 1890 and 1910, Boston’s population alone grew by 25 percent. This urban concentration created a centralized demand for Christmas trees that grew every year.
Northern farmers and woodsmen welcomed this development. So did schooner captains and their crews. Their versatile vessels worked the coast year-round, hauling cargoes of fish, granite, lime, lumber, coal or canning supplies. As winter approached, they readily converted into Christmas tree ships.
The Lewis R. French once carried Christmas trees. Now it carries tourists.
The Lewis R. French, launched in 1871 from Christmas Cove in South Bristol, Maine, was one such maritime workhorse. With her sturdy oaken hull and two towering masts, she carried freight for a century. She hauled Christmas trees to evergreen markets and cans to Maine’s sardine factories.Today, her legacy continues, reborn as a passenger windjammer that still sails the Maine coast.
For Yew I Pine…
Early American Christmas trees were often spruce, pine or cedar. Their widely spaced branches were considered ideal for hanging candles and small gifts. Then, in 1892, the humble balsam fir made its celebrated debut at Boston’s Quincy Market.
Here’s how it happened: A party of Bostonians was returning via steam yacht from a caribou hunt in Newfoundland. They stopped in Sedgwick, Maine, on the Blue Hill Peninsula and journeyed inland. From a high vantage point, they beheld thousands of vigorous young balsam firs blanketing the hills and valleys.
A young balsam fir
The yacht’s owner concluded they would make ideal Christmas trees.—far superior to the scrubby, pines then common. He hired men to cut 500 trees, loaded his deck and took them to Boston to sell in the market district.
The market sellers around Faneuil Hall clamored for the fragrant, bushy trees. The yachtsman sold his entire stock at a tremendous profit and immediately sent for more. The next year, 40,000 balsams were sent to Boston. From then on, the balsam fir was the premier tree in New York and Boston.
Christmas trees at Quincy Market. Colorized by ChatGPT>
That Woodsy Odor
Buying a Christmas tree at the bustling outdoor dockside markets became an annual ritual in the big cities.
“How picturesque the sight, and how wholesome the woodsy odor, when thousands of these trees are displayed in the marketplace of a great city the week before Christmas,” exulted The Youth’s Companion in 1913.
In New York, enormous quantities of trees were sold at “the Farm,” a vast wholesale market on West Street near the Hudson River docks. A 1905 newspaper writer waxed nostalgic about the scene: “At one time West Street, with all its wide expanse of space in front of the great warehouses, was packed full of piles of evergreens… each day as evening came, showed great gaps purchasers had made in carrying out their selections, until on Saturday the huge piles had dwindled to a few remnants of the great store that had almost denuded the Maine forests.”
A Forest Weed
Not everyone celebrated the trade. In 1905, a conservation-minded newspaper editor argued for a ban on the Christmas tree ships, condemning the clearcutting of Maine’s forests.
The Bangor Daily News scoffed at such concerns. It editorialized that the balsam fir, which comprised 95 percent of a typical shipload, amounted to nothing more than a forest weed. “The balsam fir of North America is not a valuable or a useful wood,” the paper declared. It argued the tree crowded out more valuable species, and its only real merit was as a fleeting landscape ornament. Once mature, the News claimed, the trunk became brittle powder, insects reduced it to sawdust, the greens browned and fell and the tree toppled to decay into forest mold.
Furthermore, the paper opined, the Christmas tree business was a drop in the bucket, making no meaningful dent in Maine’s vast timberlands.
As World War I approached, the tradition evolved again. Churches, schools, and towns began erecting large communal trees in public squares—Augusta, Maine, installed its first municipal tree in 1913. By this time, trains and trucks were rapidly supplanting the schooners. Profit margins on the big trees shrunk, and the industry began shifting from family farmers and foragers to managed tree farms.
Large outdoor trees didn’t become a thing until after the turn of the 20th century. Here, Calvin Coolidge lights the first National Tree in 1923.
Unforgotten
The Christmas tree ships of the Atlantic might have faded quietly into history if not for a parallel—and tragic—story on the Great Lakes. There, schooners hauled evergreens from the forests of Northern Michigan and Wisconsin across Lake Michigan to Chicago. For three decades, Capt. Herman Schuenemann, known affectionately as “Captain Santa,” sold trees directly to families at the Clark Street Bridge at low cost, even giving them away to the poor.
On Nov. 23, 1912, the Rouse Simmons, overloaded with Christmas trees, set sail for Chicago into a brewing gale. The violent storm overwhelmed the schooner. The crew raised a distress flag, but the tempest snapped the mast, and the ship foundered and sank. All 17 souls aboard were lost, but not forgotten. For years afterward, sightings of a ghostly evergreen-laden schooner were reported, and divers searched for the wreck.
The wreck site of the Rouse Simmons has been found and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The English rock band iLiKETRAiNS recorded an album titled The Christmas Tree Ship, and a musical, The Christmas Tree Schooner, has seen numerous performances.
The Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw arrives at Chicago’s Navy Pier with a cargo of Christmas trees.
Most poignantly, the tradition is reborn each year in Chicago. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw now plays the part of the Christmas Tree Ship, delivering a load of trees to Navy Pier. From there, young volunteers distribute to needy families, ensuring the holiday spirt once carried on the sails of the old Christmas tree schooners continues to reach shore.
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End Notes
mages: Lewis R. French By Raphodon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7424995. Calvin Coolidge lighting the Christmas tree: Harris & Ewing, photographer. Calvin Coolidge and group at Christmas tree, Washington, D.C. [or 1924] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2016892956/>. Mackinaw by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Balsam fir by By Famartin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44027501. Featured image illustration by Google Gen=mini.
