Issues → September/October 2008 → Travel →
Mystic Seaport, CT: Scale Model Version
Arthur Payne created miniature shipbuilding port
by Mel Allen
Slide show: Mystic River Scale Model.
Inside a modest white building on the northwestern edge of the green at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, you'll find an homage to the human need to tinker, to our quest for unachievable perfection. In the early fall of 2005 on my first visit to the museum, I looked inside the building and saw an exquisitely realized world in miniature: Mystic in the mid-19th century, at the height of its shipbuilding and sailing glory.
I looked more closely, like peering at small print. The waterways were alive with all types of vessels; shipyards hummed with work. Along the edge of town, ladders leaned against apple trees, dogs dozed, laundry dried on lines, curtains hung in windows. There was nothing in the room that revealed the story of the model; it was as though it had just come to life whole.
I asked a guide and learned that what I saw here -- some 250 buildings, 30 ships, delicate street scenes -- all this was the work of Arthur Payne. Every ship had once sailed here; every house had once stood here. He had held time still with passionate precision, all at 1:128 scale. I learned that he'd first started work on the model nearly 50 years ago. Now he was old and not well.
I wish I'd gone to see him then. All writers have regrets about the people they never made time to meet. Arthur Payne died less than a year later, on June 8, 2006, at age 81, without ever finishing his Mystic model. Whenever someone asked when he was going to finish it, he always said, "Maybe three more years." He said that for a long time. Almost until the end, he was sketching, planning. He wanted to show a wedding and a funeral. He wanted to show more of daily life. In a talk he gave at the museum a few years before he took sick, he said, "We still need about 50 more ships and boats of all kinds … Ships to hay barges, stone sloops to rowboats, all active on the river, towing out, anchored, loading, unloading ... I'm working to make this more and more a living model. I want to have a man walking along carrying a beam ... To be historically accurate, you have to account for everything."
"The soul of the museum" was how Bill Peterson, Mystic Seaport's senior curator, once described the model. There's nothing like it in the world. Now on Saturday mornings, a small core of volunteers -- people Arthur Payne once mentored -- gather, and they carry on, working on the "everything." Arthur Payne's daughter Anny is one of them.
On a blue-sky day with families ambling about Mystic Seaport, I meet Anny. She wants to talk about her father, how she knew that as much as he loved her, his first love was always the little world he'd made inside the white building. "When I was a girl," she says, "Mystic was like my own little village. I hung out with him here on Saturdays. He'd let me make clay rocks, and he'd line the diorama with them."
The Payne family first came to Mystic from Canada in 1956 on vacation when Anny was 4. Her father was "an absolute charmer," she says, and soon he was chatting with the museum curator. Arthur Payne had arrived at the right place at the right time. The museum was considering creating a scale model, and here stood a man skilled in woodcarving, watchmaking, and model building, a draftsman and engineer, a man who loved precision and intricacy. "He loved making small things," Anny says. Two years later, after the aircraft plant where he was working closed, Arthur Payne came to work at Mystic Seaport.
Reader Comments
Comment from Barbara Ann Thav on September 16, 2008
Your article and photos of the Mystic Seaport miniature scale model are very interesting. My husband and I visited Mystic Seaport for the first time last month and found this exhibit to be very interesting and one you could stay in looking at all the details for hours.
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