After meeting wherever space could be found for a number of years, the Society rented space in the Mariner’s Church, built of brick with a handsome granite facade on waterfront Fore Street between Long and Commerical Wharves. The church, which has survived several fires, including the great fire of 1866, still stands at 366-376 Fore. In its room the Society kept a "respectable cabinet" of shells, minerals and other curiosities brought back by members. Member Asa Clapp figures in this story. The original scheme for the building was to subsidize the spacious third floor chapel by renting our the lower floors, with shop space at ground level, but even before the church’s dedication in June 1829, there had been allegations of graft by the trustees, a controversy (and later a lawsuit) over the measurement of the stone and other problems. After the Panic of 1837 the church’s trustees were forced to sell, and by 1839 Asa Clapp owned the major share of the building.
In roughly the same period Portland acquired a second maritime-related group with the formation of the Portland Nautical Society in late 1825. Its president was Enoch Preble, with Edward Killeran as vice president. Other Marine Society members joining the new group were William Woodbury and Lemuel Weeks, who appear in its list of officers. Very little is known about the Portland Nautical Society except that it seems to have been relatively short-lived, with the last mention of it in the Portland newspapers in February 1827. One interesting requirement for each of the Nautical Society’s members was the keeping of a "journal-book," which the Society furnished, in which captains recorded "descriptions of currents, soundings, appearances of ice, thermometrical experiments, variations of the compass, tides, &c." This systematic recording of data and analysis of it would be brought to the level of a fine art a little over a decade later Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the United States Navy in the production of his famous (and intensely useful) Wind and Current Charts, which cut many days of sailing from a number of routes.
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