The Rise and Fall of Trojan Boats: 44 Years of American Cruisers — Closed Without Warning

Nineteen ninety two. The plant at one sixty seven Greenfield Road in Lancaster goes quiet. Twenty six acres. A hundred and forty two thousand square feet of factory floor where men built boats by hand for forty four years. The new owner, Genmar, closes the doors and moves the production line eight hundred miles west to Pulaski, Wisconsin. The fiberglass molds are not packed. They are not shipped. They are cut apart and destroyed. The name survives. It is bolted onto a Carver hull built in another state by men who never set foot in Lancaster, a boat that shares nothing with the boats that made the name worth bolting on. In Pennsylvania, all that remains is a parts shop run by former employees, keeping the dead company's hardware in stock for the boats still floating. There is no announcement. There is no farewell. A company that built tens of thousands of American boats simply stops, and the people who own it at the end do not understand what they are closing. Forty four years earlier, two men drive to Troy, New York, with four thousand dollars and a borrowed trailer. James R. McQueen spent the war in the cockpit of a P-51 Mustang. Harper Hull spent it at a drafting table, designing ships for the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation, a trained naval architect. They meet at the Owens Yacht Company in Baltimore, Maryland, one selling, one drawing. McQueen likes nothing better than a scrap. The post war boom is on, the country is buying again, and the two of them are tired of working for somebody else. They want their own company. On December thirty first, nineteen forty eight, they drive to Troy and put down four thousand dollars for the assets of the Cottrell-Spoore Boatworks, a small builder of racing boats and runabouts that has run aground on its own finances. For the money they get a planer, a band saw, an assortment of woodworking tools. They man-handle the heavy machinery onto the trailer themselves and check into a motel to spend a gloomy New Year's Eve, entertaining each other with gallows humor about the giants they have just decided to fight. The first giant is Chris-Craft, the colossus of the industry. The second is Owens, the company they just walked out of. Two men, four thousand dollars, and a plan to take on both. They name the company Trojan.