Millie B And Miss Lauren Offer Unique Lake Experience

The Millie B on Lake Winnipesaukee. (Courtesy Photo)

By Thomas P. Caldwell

They say fiberglass boats have their charms, but there is nothing like a wooden boat. Testing that assertion is as easy as taking a ride on the NH Boat Museum’s Millie B or its more recent acquisition, the Miss Lauren.

The Millie B departs from the Wolfeboro Town Docks for a 45-minute to one-hour journey that makes seven or eight stops, allowing the captain to talk about the breathtaking scenery, magnificent lakeside homes, and historic boathouses.

“We stop in Jockey Cove, and there’s all sorts of stuff to talk about there,” said Chip Bierweiler, vintage boat tour manager for the Boat Museum. “Go around the corner and Madam Chiang Kai-shek [Soong Mei-ling], whose husband was the president of [Nationalist] China, lived there for a number of years.”

The tour also includes information on lake geology and the mountains, including the fact that the Ossipee Mountain Range was formed by volcanic action. The boat passes the Loon Preservation Society headquarters, with the possibility of seeing one of the most ancient birds that are still around, “although I haven’t seen loons in there recently,” Chip said, adding, “They’re out there.”

The Miss Lauren launches from North Water Marine in Paugus Bay, near Weirs Beach, for a 90-minute cruise around Lake Winnipesaukee. The tour provides a unique perspective from the lake’s southern end, with lessons on the history of Paugus Bay and the opportunity to see historic boathouses and charming lakeside cottages.

“We also offer private charters up to two hours,” Chip noted, adding, “Anything more than two hours in the boats is a little long, where we don’t have bathroom facilities, for instance. It’s an open boat, it's not covered, so you’re not getting out of the sun.”

The charters, nevertheless, are popular for the freedom they allow.

The Miss Lauren was purchased to bring the experience to the Laconia area. (Courtesy Photo)

Devon Kurtz, the new executive director of the NH Boat Museum, had a chance to get out on the water in the Millie B, and described it as “an amazing way to see the lake”.

“When we moved the boat from her winter home to her summer home in Wolfeboro, it was a great introduction to the lake,” Devon said. “A wooden boat goes through the water in a whole different way than a modern boat does. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun in a boat before.”

Asked to describe the experience, Devon said, “I think you describe it as cutting through the water, rather than bouncing along on top of it. It’s almost organic in the way it moves across the lake. You definitely feel very intimate with the lake.”

Asked whether the captains ever get stumped by passengers’ questions, he responded, “You know, you never let the truth get in the way of a good story. [No one has] seen them ever be at a lack of words.” Turning more serious, he said, “They definitely have an amazing knowledge and skill.”

The Boat Museum purchased the Millie B from Katherine Eaton and her husband around 2011, Chip said.

“I didn’t come on board as a crew member or manager until 2017,” Chip said, “but they were running tours at that time. It was pretty low-key at the time when I took over, but it’s really kicked into gear the past few years.”

So much so, in fact, that the museum purchased its second tour boat, Miss Lauren, in the summer of 2022.

“We looked at how successful Millie B was and what a great experience we were creating on one side of the lake, and we wanted to look at bringing that experience to the Laconia region,” Devon said. “So we purchased the Miss Lauren to do just that.”

Both boats are replicas of the 1928 Hacker-Craft “woodie” that helped make the company famous. John L. Hacker, a naval architect, founded the Hacker Boat Company in Detroit, Michigan, in 1908, making it one of the oldest wooden motor boat builders in the world. The company moved operations to Lake George, New York, in the 1970s.

A historical note: In 1911, Hacker designed and installed two floats on the Wright Brothers’ biplane to allow it to take off and land on water — the first use of twin floats on an aircraft.

The Hacker Boat Company employed 68 men in 1928 as demand for its mahogany runabouts with their elegant design and “breakneck speed” grew among the rich and famous. In 1930, the King of Siam ordered a custom-built 40-foot Landau-top runabout, powered by an 800 hp Packard engine.

Today, Hacker-Craft makes replicas of those classic boats, and the Millie B is one example. The 28-foot mahogany triple-cockpit is accurate “down to the seat colors”, according to the museum.

Chip admitted, “I love old vintage boats, and she’s fun to drive, and we have a great crew down there that also enjoys the time running with the boat.”

The Millie B can accommodate eight people comfortably, but can take nine people if some are children.

The tour crew numbers about 22 people, many of them captains who drive the boats, and there are dock attendants at the kiosk on the Wolfeboro Town Docks.

He notes that the Millie B was named after Mildred Beach of Wolfeboro, who served as executive secretary of the Lakes Region Association, promoting travel and tourism in the Lakes Region and across New Hampshire for more than 40 years.

“She just passed away this past April, at 101, but, growing up in Wolfeboro, I grew up knowing Mildred Beach, so kind of cool that I’m managing a boat that’s named in her honor and memory,” Chip said.

Her obituary noted, “A firm believer that ‘There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,’ (Wind and The Willows) nothing pleased Beachie more than a boat ride, whether it be a cruise on her beloved MS Mount Washington, an outing on her own Penn Yan named My Time, a steamboat in Green’s Basin, or fishing from her row boat on Lake Wentworth.”

Devon says the boat tours attract everyone “from young children to people who are now just young at heart”. The boat tours continue into the fall, but are dependent upon the weather.

“We attempt to get through Columbus Day weekend, but depending on the weather — and I call it the hurricane du jour — we’re usually done by the end of September,” Chip says. “We tried foliage tours for a while, but quite frankly, the foliage doesn’t cooperate, and the only one who really gets a good foliage ride is me when I take [the Millie B] back to Melvin Village in the fall. At the latest, we’ll close the same weekend as the museum closes.”

Visitor surveys also show that the NH Boat Museum’s new location at 130 Whittier Highway (Route 25) in Moultonborough is leaving “outstanding impressions” of the experience, according to Devon.

“It’s a wonderful way to showcase our collection. When you go downstairs into our main galleries, all of the boats are sitting in a marina, so you can go up onto the docks and see down into the boats, or you can walk on the floor and see under the boats, so you get a great bird's eye view and a view from what the fish would see,” he said.

The museum is currently fundraising to match its Northern Borders Regional Commission grant that will allow a 6,000-square-foot expansion of the main floor for additional exhibits.

Reservations for the boat tours and other programs are available online at https://www.nhbm.org/boat-rides/tickets-times, but passengers are urged to check in at 603-794-0938 to make sure the boat rides or charters are not canceled due to rain or extremely windy conditions. Boat tour tickets are also available from dock attendants, allowing people to make last-minute reservations to board the Millie B or Miss Lauren.