Hinckley Yachts Partners with Southwest Harbor Public Library on Digital Archive Project
SOUTHWEST HARBOR – This past summer Hinckley Yachts awarded a grant to the Southwest Harbor Public Library in celebration of the company’s 90th anniversary. The Library used the funds to add 1,400 Hinckley related photographs to its Digital Archive. The images are of sail and motor yachts, working boats, and vessels Hinckley built for the military during WWII (in 1942, the company received the Army-Navy “E” Award for excellence in production of war equipment). Many of the photos show boats under construction and under sail off the waters of Mount Desert Island. The images can be seen online at swhplibrary.net/hinckley.
About the grant Hinckley Chief Marketing Officer Pete Saladino said “We are very pleased to have partnered with the Southwest Harbor Public Library to fund an effort to make more of the Library’s collection of historical Hinckley photographs available online. Visitors to the Library’s Digital Archive can now see more images of our yachts, the people who built them, and the waters that shaped their design.”
The Digital Archive contains more than 10,000 historical photographs, documents, maps, and research material given to and shared with the library since about 1900. The collection illustrates the way people, businesses, vessels, places, structures, organizations, and events relate to one another and tells the story of how islanders and “people from away” lived on and visited Mount Desert Island, Maine, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
The Library has a backlog of some 30,000 items still to go into the Digital Archive. Thanks to dozens of volunteers who spent thousands of hours scanning, most of the items have been digitized, but are not yet cataloged. “Hinckley not only helped us catalog more items, their financial assistance serves as an affirmation of the importance of the tireless effort of Library volunteers who have given so much time to preserve our rich history” said Library trustee George Soules.
Hinckley has been building and servicing America’s finest yachts since 1928. Founded to build and care for the boats of the local lobstermen in Southwest Harbor, Maine, Hinckley quickly developed a reputation for unsurpassed quality and innovation. The years that followed saw the company building true classics of American yachting from the Bermuda 40 to the Picnic Boat. Each new Hinckley yacht carries with it the symbol, Talaria, which marks the swift pursuit of superior ideas. Today, Hinckley builds highly innovative, owner-driven, power and sailing yachts from 29 to 55 feet. Nine yacht care centers from Maine to Florida complete the Hinckley offering by providing service, refits, transportation and storage for a pinnacle ownership experience.
To learn more about the Digital Archive, visit swhplibrary.net or call the Library at (207) 244-7065. To learn more about Hinckley Yachts, visit hinckleyyachts.com.
