The Carpenter’s Boat Shop announced May 1st that Matthew Jacobs, an experienced preservationist for the National Park Service, will take the helm of the 47-year-old organization, succeeding Luke O’Neill, who has served as interim director since March 2025 while the shop’s Board of Directors searched for a permanent leader.
The appointment was announced by Board President Abby Rowe, who said, “His thoughtful leadership and his many talents will make him an excellent steward” of the nonprofit Boat Shop’s mission, which is defined as “building boats, nurturing lives, helping others.” She also offered high praise for O’Neill’s service, saying his “leadership and business skills enabled all staff members to work at their highest potential, resulting in an incredibly positive apprenticeship, higher-than-usual fundraising success, the completion of several key campus improvement projects and renewed connections with community partners.”
O’Neill will stay for a two-week transition with Jacobs in August and plans to retain his connection to the Carpenter’s Boat Shop as a future member of its Board.
Jacobs, an Iraq War veteran who is now a pacifist and practicing Quaker, is an experienced carpenter who has helped restore the historic homes of former U.S. presidents and fostered preservation education for the park service.
The son of a builder, Jacobs said he learned carpentry from his father and has an extensive background in hands-on woodwork as well as in training and supervising experienced craftspeople and young workers in construction and preservation skills during his nearly 15 years as a Park Service employee. He currently serves in the federal agency as the Director of Preservation, Education and Youth Engagement, managing an array of programs designed to imbue new generations with the ideals of preservation, craftsmanship and stewardship. Jacobs, his wife Allyson, and their four children will move from their home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to occupy the director’s house adjacent to the Boat Shop’s main campus. The family also brings the Boat Shop back to its roots in pacifism and Quaker philosophy.
The Rev. Robert Ives and his late wife Ruth, founded the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in 1979, when the wounds of the Vietnam War that split the country were still raw. Ruth was a Quaker, and her husband had declared himself a conscientious objector when summoned for the draft. His mother had been a Quaker, and his father, like much of the family, was a protestant minister. Ives, who retired several years ago but still volunteers his time and teaching boatbuilding, said he was delighted with the appointment of Jacobs that he described as “filled with meaning and purpose.”
Jacobs said he was always committed to serving his community and joined the Army in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. He signed up to be a surveyor, but after the United States entered the war in Iraq, the Army retrained him as a military police officer before he was deployed to Iraq. He completed his enlistment, but in 2012, he and his wife Allyson started attending Quaker meetings “as a direct result of the experience in Iraq,” and they are raising their children as Quakers.
Jacobs and his NPS team at the Park Service have introduced more than 250 New York City high school students to their first camping experiences and trained more than 1,500 young people in the building trades. He said he learned about the Carpenter’s Boat Shop about 15 years ago and later hired a former apprentice, Dan Asher, to work with him at the Park Service. Asher returned to the Boat Shop and is now the fleet and facilities manager at the campus on Old County Road.
The pairing of Jacobs’ skills with The Carpenter’s Boat Shop combines his longtime interest in historic preservation and restoration with the shop’s traditional approach to building wooden boats. As a trained architect with a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Jacobs has had some experience in the maritime industry having meticulously documented the Schooner Ernestina in his early days with the Park Service and through supporting the reconstruction and duplication of the century-old Caprice, one of 28 boats designed and built for racing in the Sound Interclub Class in the 1920s.
Jacobs’ knowledge of preservation and traditional trades should serve the Boat Shop well. The campus has a number of old structures, including a couple of 19th-century farm buildings and a timber-frame carriage house now used primarily for storage. In 2006, the framing for a new workshop was erected from the ground up in four days by a team of skilled Amish workers using traditional wooden mortise-and-tenon joints to hold its sturdy timbers together.
“I am thrilled that such a highly qualified, kind and thoughtful man as he will be coming to take the helm for this next chapter in the life of the Boat Shop,” Ives said. “It’s so gratifying and humbling to think that the Boat Shop is continuing on beyond what Ruth and I began almost 50 years ago on a wing and prayer.”
We thank Michael Putzel, former member of the Boat Shop’s Board of Directors for crafting this announcement. Michael is a distinguished writer who covered many of the greatest news stories of his generation, from the Civil Rights Movement to Vietnam.