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Gloucester: Cenotaph plaques undergo cleaning

By Richard Gaines
Staff writer
Published: June 30, 2008

The Man at the Wheel statue has been without his "crew" for the past two and a half weeks, but they will be back soon, though at a date uncertain.

The 10 bronze plaques bearing the names of the 5,370 Gloucester fishermen or men fishing on Gloucester boats whose deaths at sea since the start of record-keeping in Gloucester could be archaically verified were moved for the first major refurbishing since the memorial was installed in a semicircle nearby the statue in 2000.

Gaspar Lafata, chairman of the Fishermen's Memorial Cenotaph Committee, said he expected the memorial to be sparkling and reassembled "on or before (July) 14."

A cenotaph is a monument to honor dead people whose remains are interred elsewhere.

The Gloucester cenotaph memorial is a revered and popular tribute to the toll taken by the fishing culture which has been at the core of the history of the "nation's oldest seaport," as Gloucester has chosen to define itself, since settlement in 1623.

Lafata said the work — beginning with cleaning and sandblasting to remove the greenish oxidation to get back to the original bronze color — is complete, and the plaques have also been covered with a saltwater-repellent lacquer.

They were removed with difficulty to the Paul King Foundry in Cranston, R.I., for the restorative maintenance, a process projected to cost the committee $17,000, Lafata said.

But the reinstallation is delayed by a shortage of special order, bronze bolts, whose tops can be hidden by decorative brass rosette tops that once screwed in cannot be removed.

That aesthetic addition to the cenotaph was an unfulfilled detail in the original order eight years ago.

Lafata said he, members of the committee and the police had gotten numerous calls about the missing plaques.

The Rhode Island foundry was waiting for the delivery of the bolts from Matthews International Corp., which was founded in Pittsburgh in 1850 by John Dixon Matthews, a skilled engraver who emigrated from Sheffield, England.

Matthews cast the original plaques for the committee in 2000. Lafata said the project of transferring to bronze years of exhaustive research to find and verify the identities of the men who went "down to the sea in ships" and getting the plaques put up cost about $95,000.

Coming from the 107th Psalm, the poetic phrase for death at sea, was chosen as the theme for the Fishermen's Monument, which was commissioned and erected for the city's grand tricentennial celebration in 1923.

That was a good time for Gloucester. Its fishery was heralded everywhere as a world leader. Gorton's was the dominant distributor of processed fish foods, and Clarence Birdseye was on the verge of perfecting the landmark innovation of flash frozen foods down on the Fort, just behind Pavilion Beach.

With the largesse of the times, Stacy Boulevard and many of the mansions along the Outer Harbor were built.

It seems from Internet research and discussion with Lafata that the Fishermen's Monument and the Vietnam Memorial cenotaph in Washington, D.C., with the names of the American dead in the Vietnam War are unique in the extreme commitment to comprehensiveness.

Still, Lafata said, probably as many Gloucester fishermen died in work around the world, notably on boats from California and Canadian Maritime ports, as died in fishing trips from Gloucester.

Most of their names, sadly, Lafata said, are lost to history for the lack of resources to conduct the same intensive research into the archives of countless foreign ports that was needed to produce a full roster of the known dead from fishing out of Gloucester.

The committee meets every five years to consider whether the list of 5,370 names on the plaques should be expanded, as it was in 2001.

Soon after the plaques went up, Lafata said the 10th plaque and its granite base were replaced at a cost of $6,000 to $8,000 to add two names — Thomas W. Frontiero and James Sanfilippo — Gloucester fishermen who were lost in a 2001 sinking.

Anticipating that the list could grow, the base was made 6 inches wider and room was left on the plaque for the addition of more names.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.

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