Anchor to Windward
Union Wharf reflects a family's belief in doing things right

Gooogle Earth

On Portland's waterfront, the current spotlight may shine most brightly on Maine State Pier, where an unresolved identity crisis festers over differing visions of just what development dream will rise out of the rotting pilings of this publicly owned pier. Yet, a few wharves down from all the sturm und drang, there stretches Union Wharf, 110 feet wide, 180 feet from end to end. Here, one family has been successfully sustaining waterfront businesses for 214 years.

The Poole family of Union Wharf -- named so long ago that English pounds were the currency of the day -- lays claim to a rare surviving piece of Portland's 18th century economic infrastructure. Here thrives a successful 21st Century business. The pier has sustained change, of course, but today its more than four acres still house primarily marine-related tenants: Maine Spill Response Corp. (the company that owns MAINE RESPONDER, Portland's only oil spill recovery vessel), the Brown Ship Chandlery and Custom Float Business (owned and managed by the Poole family), Cozy Harbor Seafood, Marine Lobster Direct and Portland Pilots.

Stop and smell the sea air for a minute: there's not a whiff of condos, comedy clubs or planned office complexes with gourmet food emporiums here.

On a typical day here, Parker Poole, Jr., 81, will stop by for a couple hours, determined to keep his sharp eye on the family's legacy -- for decades he ran the wharf with a keen business sense driven by a former Marine's code of personal ethics. When a man becomes one with his business, he continues to haunt the place, even post-retirement.

"As long as I can remember, my father has worked with heart, soul and being as the proprietor here," attests his son Charlie. "If a person could literally be attached to a wharf, he's attached. His office is his inner sanctum and when he's there, all is right with the world."

This Yankee family is of the opinion that the only things worth doing are those done right; at Union Wharf, rotting piles are unthinkable. Maintenance and renovations may be expensive drains on the already-limited cash flows private piers generate, but that's chit chat to a man like Parker Poole, Jr. Ask him about piling renovations and you're speaking to a man who was among the Marine forces occupying Nagasaki after the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb. (Wharfinger Senior then barks the facts of life: every 10 feet, Union Wharf has a piling, in total upwards of 300 pilings that each cost about $1,000 to repair.) "Depends on how fast the worms get at them," he unflinchingly hits the bottom line. "Twenty-five years, depending."

Officially, however, Parker Poole, Jr., has turned the wharfinger's (as in "wharf manager") job over to Charlie, a son quite proud to repeat his father's imperatives. "Portland will always show the world a working waterfront -- and we might as well have a front row seat," he says, quoting his father, who after serving in World War II, returned home, surveyed his family's property and took action.

"A wharf is an instrument to earn money," sums up the senior Poole, who felt no regret when he tore down everything built before the 1940s, replacing wooden buildings with fireproof structures.

In 1941, the elder Poole establish Brown Ship Chandlery to serve the urgent needs of Portland's wartime waterfront, then a major cargo port, naval base and shipbuilding center; the company went on to become an oil terminal serving northern New England and Eastern Canada via the Portland-Montreal pipeline. Currently, the company supplies oil tankers and other vessels with everything from laundry services to life raft inspections to offering up to 3,000-pound fork trucks and a 1.5-ton mechanical hoist capacity -- and then there's the 40-foot freight boat with eight-ton capacity, complete with radar, radio and cell phone.

"He wants to leave a tip-top pier," explains his son. "He'll tell us all, `it's a great anchor to windward.'"

Holding an important piece of property in good order also holds together a family and that is the heart of what keeps Union Wharf thriving. On the subject of condos, Parker Poole, Jr. maintains limited patience. "The pearl in the oyster is here," he says gruffly. "The condos next door don't promote a lot of jobs -- once you lose your wharf to condos that's the crowd you get."

Another bit of wisdom from the patriarch: "Seek perfection in things you do and you will be rewarded."

Such a philosophy means Union Wharf enjoys the equivalent of bounce-the-coin-off-the-tightly-made-bed kind of maintenance: this pier will never sink into the sea as long as the Poole family owns it. The legacy his father leaves, explains his son, is "to do it right -- invest back in your business; take some of the money paid by tenants every month and put it back into the pier, so those tenants will always be here."

In the late 1990s, Parker Poole, Jr., mulled over how best to ensure that his grandchildren's grandchildren would be well schooled in family lore. One way to keep your descendants from wavering from longstanding family values is to put the illustrious story in writing, and so in the late 1990s Poole commissioned Susan Gold and Jill Cournoyer to write The History of Union Wharf, printed in 1998 by Custom Communications of Saco, Maine. This slim book's highlights are sure to provide quiz answers for future Poole children might at major family dinners:

• In the 1800s, huge, graceful square riggers carrying molasses, sugar and lumber docked at Union Wharf enroute to the West Indies.
• During the War of 1812, this wharf accommodated the grim funerals for the two captains who died in their ships' famous duel off Monhegan.
• In the 1850s, when landfill created Commercial Street, trains traveled to Canada via the Grand Trunk Railroad, with Union Wharf serving a vital part of the transportation network.

At present, Parker Poole, Jr., heads a family of five children, 15 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. And aside from a nice piece of Portland waterfront real estate and a going business on it, here's nothing like a good book about both to pass along. q