By Gail M. Martin
In the early 1920s, John Alden and assistant, Samuel Crocker, created the Indian class one-design sailboat. Indians were centerboard open cockpit sloops, 21 feet long and 16.75 feet at the waterline. They carried a mainsail, jib (over 220 sq ft) and spinnaker, and were crewed by two or three plus a skipper. Indians were popular in New England with racing fleets active into the 1970s.
\
The Indian was designed by John Alden and Samuel Crocker in the early 1920s.
Though they were deemed unsuitable for junior sail training, the 21-foot Indians were lively performers, especially in a breeze.
Marconi rigs replaced the gaffs on earlier boats.
Abundant sail area was useful on light days.
Alden and Crocker based their design on the Swampscott dory, used by fishermen and later as the X-class racing dory. As the Indian class design evolved it featured higher splash rails than the dories. Some Indians had gaff-rigged mainsails, but that soon changed to Marconi rigs. Plans for the Indians are currently available at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hart Library in the John Alden collection, and via WoodenBoat magazine.
At the behest of the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead as a possible sail training boat for juniors, Lawson’s boatyard in Dorchester, Massachusetts constructed the first three boats in 1921. Club members soon recognized Indians as not appropriate for that purpose – they were used in the Sears Cup junior championships in 1921-22 but were deemed too advanced for young sailors. However, they were gradually embraced as sleek, fine-performing sailboats exceptionally suited to racing. Subsequently, the popularity of Indians increased significantly, and they were sought after by yacht clubs in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and even in New York on Long Island. As a consequence of the varying racing environments, at least four different variations of design were built: the first three Eastern Yacht Club boats (design 135), a centerboard lapstrake design (design 148), a full keel design that was quicker and longer (design 293), and a carvel-planked boat with a centerboard (design 398). Fleets developed in Maine, Massachusetts Bay and Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, Narragansett Bay and Mount Hope Bay in Rhode Island, and Long Island, New. The Nantucket fleet is still active as of 2025. The Nantucket Yacht Club showed fifteen boats raced in the Saturday series on July 5, 2025 on their website race results.
The Massachusetts Bay fleet was the first to evolve after a member of the Squantum Yacht Club purchased the first three boats for himself and later convinced other members to buy two of them from him. The Massachusetts Bay Indian Class Association was organized on September 22, 1927, the name coined from the original inhabitants of the Squantum peninsula and therefore for the yacht club itself. Interclub racing was in full swing by then. In 1927 there were over 20 boats in Massachusetts Bay, and by 1938 there were over 50. By 1948, nine yacht clubs had full racing schedules for the Indians, with Massachusetts Bay having over ninety boats and Nantucket over twenty.
The Narragansett Bay Indian fleet was organized a bit later. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Indians began appearing on the bay, yet they were embraced with the same enthusiasm as in Massachusetts. In fact, initially Rhode Island sailors purchased boats from the Massachusetts fleets.
The Narragansett Bay Indian Class Association was formed by 1939. Until that time, Peggy, #18, and Lulu, #6, and a handful of others were relegated to racing with the “T” class. On January 2, 1939, seven boat owners and seventeen other interested parties met at the Narragansett Boat Club and founded the Narragansett Bay Indian Class Association. The next meeting a few weeks later was attended by a representative of the Massachusetts Bay Indian Class Association and following discussion the group adopted the Massachusetts by-laws.
By the 1940s, the number of Indians on Narragansett Bay had considerably increased. Younger sailors outgrew smaller one-design boats or aged out of their current classes and were eager to race the larger Indians. Adult interest also increased, and many honed their skills in Indians, but after a number of young men volunteered or were drafted into the services for World War II, the Narragansett Bay fleet scheduled only eight regattas in 1944. Once the war was over and soldiers and sailors returned, the number of events rebounded and the fleet continued growing. In 1947 there were twenty boats in the fleet, and over the next year it increased to twenty-eight. Many new owners belonged to west bay yacht clubs such as the Edgewood and Rhode Island Yacht Clubs in Cranston, and the East Greenwich Yacht Club.
In 1952 there were thirty-five Indians in the Narragansett Bay Indian fleet, and the boats were big player in the Narragansett Bay Yachting Association regattas, and by this author’s count at least forty-seven different Indian class boats took part. This coincided with the decrease in the Massachusetts Bay fleet. New builds nearly ceased by the early ‘50s due to several factors: the aging of the basic design which had not changed in over thirty years, the retirement of many wooden boat builders, and the embracing of fiberglass as the preferred hull material. By 1956, the Narragansett Bay Indian Class Association had twenty-six boats registered to members.
The 1960s saw a shift in boat ownership and association leadership from clubs in the west bay to the east bay – namely Tiverton and the Tiverton Yacht Club. By 1965 there were twenty-two events scheduled for the Indian class – twenty on Narragansett Bay and two in Boston where the Indian National Championships were held in September.
A number of Indian skippers moved up to other classes including the Herreshoff ‘S’ class, with Ralph Potter (owner of Indian Penny and The Braves) of the Edgewood Yacht Club, a former president of the Association and five-time class champion being one. He kept his Indian number to reuse on his S boat and changed the name from Liability to Obsession.
Another duo who won multiple prizes in the Indian class and served dutifully as class officers were Charlie LaRoue and Tom Toolin (owners of Matoka) of the Tiverton Yacht Club. Once retired from Indian class competition, Charlie raced a fellow TYC member’s Ensign in the 1969 National Championship off Stonington, Connecticut and won the competition. He raced his Jena in the Narragansett Bay Yachting Association’s Cruising Class, but his passion eventually led to extended cruises in the waters off of Maine with fellow retired racers.
Thomas Toolin (profiled in the July WindCheck) was boat partners with Charlie LaRoue for a number of years. While he gave up his partnership in the early 1960s, he never lost interest in the class. He remained a member and was an officer in the Association until 1970. He maintained meticulous records on the history of the class that exist to this day. His slide collection documents the class visually and his enthusiasm lives on in others. ■
This Indian shows off her sleek lines and sporty paint job with an arrowhead sheer stripe.
The Rolt Family: Boatbuilders, Engineers, Scientists, Historians
The Rolt family has always been heavily invested in Indian Class sailboats. George H. Rolt (b.1897) lived in South Boston and worked as a loftsman and rigger at the Boston Naval Shipyard and also had his own wooden boatbuilding shop. He specialized in one-design classes such as Snipe, Hustler, Radio and Indian class boats. His son, George H., II (b.1932), also worked in the boatbuilding shop with his dad as a young man and they raced together in 30 square meter sailboats off Marblehead.
In 1927, racing a South Boston Yacht Club member’s boat, Gosling (Indian #15), he became first champion of the then-new Massachusetts Bay Indian Class Association. He became the class Measurer in 1930, so he was ineligible in Indians for class points so instead raced in I- and MI-class eighteen footers. He gave up his role as Measurer in 1932 and, sailing Mohawk (#10), repeated his winning season for another Massachusetts Bay Indian championship, thus fulfilling his destiny as a ‘crack Indian skipper’ as one newspaper writer at the time put it.
George II attended Northeastern University majoring in engineering, working intermittently in the boat shop, and after graduation was off to a career in the aviation industry and graduate study at UCLA. He returned to Boston in 1955, working as a civilian for the U.S. Air Force while earning MSEE and MBA degrees from NU. He never forgot his sailing roots and inspired his family with his skills and appreciation of all things nautical. He also retained an encyclopedic knowledge of his father’s favorite boats, the Indian class and especially the Massachusetts fleets of yachts.
George’s son, Ken, has now taken up the mantle of his family, working as an ocean engineer and author of 28 scientific papers after earning graduate degrees at MIT in the department once known as Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. Ironically, he attended an institution where his grandfather had left various relics in the MIT museum holdings for his work on sailboat racing, building and restoration. Like his father and grandfather, Ken is also intently invested and interested in yachting and serves as an Indian class historian with an insider’s view of many of the Indians in the Mass Bay Yachting Association fleet. He has a firm grip on the design and evolution of the hull and rig (Marconi vs. gaff) of the Indian class and an unrequited desire to trace every Indian class boat ever built from birth to demise or revival. He himself is building boats in his ‘spare time’ and has the plans for the Indian, John Alden design 148.
Gail M. Martin is a writer who has completed a photo history book on the Indian Class featuring Tom Toolin’s photos. To find out more about this book and others, visit newenglandmaritimepublications.weebly.com. Thanks go also to Ken Rolt whose family have sailed Indians for generations and who has provided facts used in this article.
