The Shenandoah is more than a boat to the Harbor History Museum and its eager crew of restorationists. It’s a valuable piece of local history, and it’s an educational tool to teach that history to a new generation of Gig Harbor residents.

“You could do 10 years of programming here,” Nate Slater, the museum’s shipwright, said as he stood atop the old ship’s deck on a rainy Saturday. Slater’s volunteer crew worked to fit a piece of new wood into place at the Shenandoah’s bow.

Slater was hired by the museum as a contractor to spearhead the restoration of the ship, a 65-foot wooden fishing boat that was built at Gig Harbor’s Skansie Shipyard in 1925. Unlike most local ships, the Shenandoah was never owned by anyone from outside of Gig Harbor. It ventured to Alaska most summers before it returned home for the fall chum season.

Slater’s restoration work quickly expanded to include educational programming to demonstrate the process, rather than merely do the work, of shipbuilding.

“I’m teaching-oriented,” said Slater, who works on fishing boats in the harbor as his day job. “The generation that taught me how to do all this stuff, their teaching method was ‘go do it, and when you mess up, I’ll tell you how you messed up.’ There was really no educational method to it.”

He didn’t want to bring that style to the Shenandoah project, so he’s enlisted a group of volunteers, largely from that previous generation he described, to help. Several local men, many of whom are retired and have various experience in shipbuilding and woodworking, meet for a few hours every Saturday morning to work on the renovation – rotten wood must be removed, saved and labeled; a template for a new piece must be created, built and installed.

“What goes back has to exactly match everything that came off,” said Joe Uhlman, a retired lifelong resident of Gig Harbor whose grandfather, Joe Skansie, first built the Shenandoah in his shipyard.

The process is made more difficult, Slater said, because the Shenandoah wasn’t always kept in the best of shape while it was in use.

“This boat wasn’t built to last forever,” he said. “It was a work boat.”

There is extra material in some parts of the boat’s frame, where parts have been “sistered,” or quickly duplicated, for a temporary repair in order to make it through another fishing season.

“Part of the game is to figure out what was original, and what was just a quick a fix to go fishing,” Slater said.

It’s slow work, duplicating and replacing every rotten piece of the old ship, but it’s important to Slater and his crew to respect the ship’s history.

“It would’ve been more efficient, in a sense, just to have a crew rebuild it, but that’s not what we’re about,” Slater said. “This is a historical object, and it’s an educational tool.”

He said their current rate of progress, which now includes volunteers working on Fridays as well, will bring them about halfway down the ship’s deck by next summer. The work started last October at the bow, although the crew first had to construct scaffolding and a large staircase to fit around the boat in its resting place behind the museum.

Initial funding came from a state grant, and Slater said he is currently looking for funding to continue the work once the grant runs out in a year. Slater and the museum also received grants from Pierce County and the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the project’s educational component, which has manifested in interactive displays around the ship and classes on its restoration. Displays demonstrate corking, riveting, knot-tying and other elements of building a wooden ship, knowledge that Slater said is disappearing.

“Shipwrighting’s lost,” he said, pointing toward the rise in more cost-effective fiberglass and steel ships built in recent decades. “It’s kind of sad that I have to teach shipwrighting at a museum instead of a vocational school, because these ships should be being built. But they’re dinosaurs.”

For many of the volunteers, passing along what they’re learning from Slater is a big reason why they devote part of their week to the project.

“It’s valuable, it connects the people to their history,” said Steve Mitchell, who started to volunteer three months ago. “Let’s face it: the elders aren’t going to live forever, so we need to have visible connections to this lifestyle surround museum-goers, like kids and teenagers.”

Some youth are more directly involved with the restoration through a YMCA program that places teenagers with court-ordered community service at volunteer work sites. Several teens have been placed on the Shenandoah project, and they have repainted parts of the ship and provided Slater with other help.

“It’s a win-win, because those kids don’t want to pick up garbage by the side of the road, and here they’re a part of the process and engaged,” Slater said.

YMCA program coordinator Dennis Taylor said the Shenandoah project provides many skills teenagers can use later in life, and the goal of the program is to simulate a workplace environment – there are timecards, performance evaluations and other aspects of a fully functional workplace.

“They’ve made some poor choices and gotten in trouble, so part of what we teach them here is responsible behavior in workplace decisions,” Taylor said.

Slater’s crew would like to see the Shenandoah become a centerpiece of the community, where people of all ages can gather to learn about the area’s history.

“After all, it was built just 200 yards that way,” said Uhlman, gesturing down the harbor toward the site where his grandfather once built all manner of wooden ships all those years ago.