Center features Kalmar Nyckel training deck, models, more

The Copeland Maritime Center boasts an impressive rendition of the Kalmar Nyckel’s main deck, a stunning collection of 72 miniature ships, a 19th century log cabin and a lot of potential.

The 18,000-square-foot center dominates the Kalmar Nyckel Shipyard, just down the Christina River from where the Kalmar Nyckel in 1638 brought Swedish and Finnish settlers to Wilmington, making the first permanent European settlement in Delaware.

The new center dramatically expands how the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation can teach maritime arts, history, science, technology, engineering and math to students, the public and its 300 volunteers.

A replica ship, launched in 1997, “is a limited, complicated and expensive classroom,” said Sam Heed, the foundation’s senior historian and education director. “We needed to become a destination.”

And it is.

But before you head to Wilmington’s Seventh Street peninsula, understand that the $3.6 million center, named for donors Gerret and Tatiana Copeland, is not a museum. It’s best appreciated in classes, camps and other group programs. On your own, it’s $5 for self-guided tours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Details: www.kalmarnyckel.org.

In the center, the first floor is for ship maintenance, the second for exhibits and the third for offices.

The entrance area on the exhibit floor is for STEM subjects like buoyancy, navigation (a grid of decking on the floor can be used to teach longitude and latitude), sail-handling and sailing (which involves understanding wind vectors and balancing loads) and mechanical advantages (“simple machines combine to make a complex ship,” Heed said).

The largest space holds the main deck model, three-quarters life size. It’s simplified, but its design means volunteers “can do much more than grab lines,” he said. “They can learn how the sail operates.”

The log cabin, in an adjacent alcove, “shows that you don’t need nails or sawn wood” to create housing, Heed said. This one was discovered in Idaho, but the history of this American icon started in Wilmington. Nearby is a model of Fort Elfsborg, a Swedish fort in New Jersey.

Heed said that visitors can “take a tour of all seven seas” with the miniature ship models that Bob and Marilyn Forney started collecting in 1975 – with a crystal model of the Kalmar Nyckel.

“Every time we’d go some place, we’d look for a model,” Marilyn said of the journeys for work (Bob shepherded Dacron) and fun that took them around the world at least five times. “It was a treasure hunt.” And if they came up empty, they commissioned models, all but one sailing or rowing vessels.

Their Watercraft of the World collection helps people understand the importance of waterways in world history, Marilyn said. And when they were downsizing from their home in Unionville, Pennsylvania, they chose this facility for their models, turning down interest from the Smithsonian, because “Delaware has been good to us.”

Visitors can read brief information about each model, and they can point their smartphones at QR codes – those complicated arrangements of black and white squares – to hit webpages with details.

A deck overlooking the river and a small meeting room finish the floor.

The center is part of an $11 million project to improve the shipyard and acreage across the street, raising parts and creating a swale to avoid flooding, adding parking and remediating brownfields.

The potential lies both inside – there’s a lot of unclaimed wall space, and room to show off exhibits, such as the tools that settlers would have had – and outside. The shipyard also features a dock (a stop on the Riverfront water taxi service), a gun deck, a blacksmith shop, a barge (donated by Sweden’s king in 1988) and a railroad car, all of which can be interpreted for visitors.

The potential also lies in revealing other important historical aspects of the area. More than 10,000 ships were constructed here, Heed said, and at one point Wilmington was the largest manufacturer of railroad cars in the U.S. Telling the stories of this combination will eventually let visitors “see how America’s global supremacy started on the Seventh Street peninsula,” he said.

WHILE YOU’RE THERE

The Fort Christina National Historic Landmark, which marks about where the Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip landed in 1638, is open regularly for the first time in more than a decade. Due to safety, security and financial concerns, the 2-acre site had been padlocked and open only for special events.

Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Sept. 5, thanks to a partnership between the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, the First State National Historical Park and the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation. Admission is free.

The site – one of seven components of the national park – is dominated by a 1938 monument featuring the Kalmar Nyckel. The reopening is part of a push to promote the history of Wilmington’s Seventh Street peninsula, which also includes Old Swedes Church and the Hendrickson House.