Mark Wilkins is the director and curator of the Atwood House Museum, home of the Chatham Historical Society. Mr. Wilkins has worked for the Smithsonian Institution. Formerly the director and curator of the Cape Cod Maritime Museum, he and a dedicated band of volunteers built a replica of an 1886 Crosby catboat, the Sarah. Mr. Wilkins lectures on a variety of historical topics on the Cape and the South Shore. He has spent many years researching and developing vessels for which little or no conclusive evidence exists. He spends many hours in archives, libraries, and museums ferreting out bits of information that will lend clarity to what such vessels may have looked like.

He then constructs a detailed model and an overview of the "chain of evidence" to support his conclusions. These have been executed for various maritime museums nationwide. He endeavors to make this process a collaborative effort between historians, curators, independent researchers and boat builders. Mr. Wilkins also has made several speculative reconstructions of vessels from the seventeenth century and builds historic replicas of full-sized boats.