Juliana Pilar von Pilchau, the widow of the Baron of Audru, launched from her manor the first cargo ship built out of local forest products from Pärnu County manorial estates in 1824. This ship was needed for shipping firewood to markets in Pärnu and Riga, which increased the income of the baroness. Yet this promising beginning did not become the start of continuous shipbuilding in the area. The next ship was built in Audru a hundred years later when the barons had left the area. The district commissar and chamberlain Reinhold Stael von Holstein was the owner of the private manors of Uulu-Surju. He further developed the maritime infrastructure that had been built at the start of the 19th century and had ships built to market the abundance of forest products from those private manors. The number of ships built at the manorial estate was nevertheless limited to two. It was not until peasants started working jointly that shipbuilding became a branch of the economy that lasted in Pärnu County for eight decades. In the 1860s, Pärnu County’s coastal peasants started building long-distance ships out of pine wood. Even the only shipyard in the territory of present-day Estonia, the Herder shipyard in Pärnu, had not consistently launched such ships. The greatest impediment to shipbuilding had been scarcity of building material because only oak wood had been considered suitable as wood for ships in the Baltic German tradition. The supply of oak trees, however, was very limited. Only peasants who were independent of that tradition could bring about a breakthrough in shipbuilding. They started building sufficiently large and relatively inexpensive sailing ships out of softwood from the conifers that grew in abundance in the Orajõe and Häädemeeste forests. These ships already started being used for merchant voyages in the latter half of the 1860s to ports located beyond the Danish straits. Cabotage, which had earlier been limited to the eastern, western, and southern coasts of the Baltic Sea and which primarily employed single-mast vessels known as skutes, which were not covered by decks, was significantly bolstered by the introduction of two- and three-mast ships. The main part of this article explores shipbuilding by coastal peasants from the crown manors of Häädemeeste, Orajõe, Tahkuranna, and Seli in the mid-19th century as well as at the start of the shipbuilding boom that burst forth around 1865. A clear difference prevailed in the pace of development in shipbuilding at crown manors with a less restrictive climate for enterprise compared to the private manors of Audru, Uulu, Tõstamaa, and Pootsi, which to a greater or lesser extent adhered to the customs of serfdom. Coastal peasants of crown manors had the advantage since the tenant proprietors of those manors developed the profitability of their manors and supported the entrepreneurship of their peasants. Thereat, numerous communities of coastal dwellers in particular, which were inspired by internal competition, had a visible advantage. Factors that fostered or hindered shipbuilding in the 1860s and 1870s are pointed out in the last part of the article, along with reasons for why Pärnu County in particular became the birthplace of Estonian merchant shipping in the 19th century.