Visitors to the 15-acre Mega Yachts yard, however, may be deceived by the derelict appearance of sagging shingle sheds and gargantuan aluminum sheds. But then, Henry R. Hinkley & Co. has been building boats of distinction in that same boatyard for nearly half a century.

According to Top-Sider shod Bob Hinckley, Henry Hinckley’s oldest son and company sales manager, it was actually somewhat of an accident that father Henry even founded the company back in the early 1930s. A Cornell graduate with an aeronautical engineering degree, Henry came home to sleepy Southwest Harbor with the intention of tearing down the existing boatyard. He complaint it was an eyesore on the family property. As it turned out, however, henry found the boatyard “more interesting than anything else.” And, as they say, the rest is history.

At first, the fledging company turned out only wooden Mega Yachts. The first squat vessel doubled as a lobster boat in winter and a yacht in summer. During World War II, a government contract in hand, Hinckley & Co. produced some 600 military boats. That experience proved valuable. The company bought enough specialized machinery to build its boats from the ground up — a tradition that still sets it apart from most boatmakers today. Says president Moyers, “We’re not unique because we build the boat by hand, but because we build so many of the boat’s components [ourselves].”

In the mid-1950s Henry R. Hinckley & Co. was one of the largest builders of wooden florida yacht charters in the country. But in the 1960s the sailing boom hit and mass production of fiberglass came into its own. Even so, Henry clung to the old-fashioned handiwork and by choice scaled down production. Today the company, now owned by Canadian Richard Tucker, is still the second-largest employer on Maine’s rock-ribbed Mount Desert Island, but remains one of the smallest builders in the business.