Kings County (barque)

History
Canada
Name	Kings County
Owner	William Thompson, Saint John, New Brunswick
Port of registry	Windsor, Nova Scotia
Builder	C.R. Burgess Yard, Kingsport, Nova Scotia
Launched	June 2, 1890
Identification	Code Letters LWBF [1]
Fate	Wrecked 1911
General characteristics
Tonnage	2061 Gross Tons
Length	255 ft.
Beam	45 ft.
Depth	25 ft.
Decks	2
Propulsion	Sail
Sail plan	Four Masted Barque

Kings County was a four-masted barque built in 1890 at Kingsport, Nova Scotia on the Minas Basin. She was named to commemorate Kings County, Nova Scotia and represented the peak of the county's shipbuilding era. (A much smaller barque also named Kings County had been built in 1871.) Kings County was one of the largest wooden sailing vessels ever built in Canada and one of only two Canadian four-masted barques. (The other was the slightly smaller John M. Blaikie of Great Village, Nova Scotia.) At first registered as a four-masted full-rigged ship, she was quickly changed to a barque after her June 2 launch.^[2] More than three thousand people from Kings and Hants counties attended the launch. She survived a collision with an iceberg on an 1893 voyage to Swansea, Wales. Like many of the large wooden merchant ships built in Atlantic Canada, she spent most of her career far from home on trading voyages around the world. In 1909, she returned to the Minas Basin for a refit at Hantsport and loaded a large cargo of lumber. In 1911 she became the largest wooden ship to enter Havana Harbour when she delivered a cargo of lumber and was briefly stranded. She was lost a few months later on a voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay when she ran aground in the River Plate.^[3] Too damaged to repair, she was scrapped in Montevideo where her massive timbers were visible for many years.

• Tom Sheppard, Historic Wolfville: Grand Pre and Countryside, Halifax: Nimbus, 2003, p. 150-151.
• Charles Armour and Thomas Lackey, Sailing Ships of the Maritime, Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1975, p. 180
• Frederick William Wallace, In the Wake of the Windships, (London, 1927), p. 223-224.

• Parks Canada Ship Information Database Registry Information^{[permanent dead link‍]}
• A History of Kingsport, Cora Atkinson, Kingsport Community Association, 1980.