Shipbuilding on the Chesapeake:
1. Steam tug on Kirby's railway
Guests arrived at the harbor of St. Michaels, Maryland, aboard a chartered steamboat in the spring of 1904. The hull of a newly-completed power vessel stood on the stocks at Thomas H. Kirby and Sons, the last working shipyard in the small oystermen's village. The town appeared to one visitor as "a clean out-of-the-world place; the white oyster-shell streets fringed with grass, giving a look like Holland." He further noted "The harbor is very cosy, and little oystermen's houses huddle close about it."1 The guests crowded into Kirby's small yard along with school children from St. Michaels and nearby Easton and many of the town's residents, including a reporter from the local paper. After a bottle was broken over the stem and a pair of wedges were knocked loose, the newly named Emma K. Reed slipped down the greased ways into the harbor.2
Several hundred wooden vessels had been launched within two miles of this spot since the late eighteenth century, four score of them from the exact site where Emma K. Reed was framed up. By 1904, however, demand for these larger wooden vessels was shrinking on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Small gasoline skiffs and modest skipjacks were doing the work of the fisheries, and the railroads were finally beginning to take freight away from the schooners. Never again would a large vessel as large as the 94-ton Emma K. Reed be launched from a Talbot County shipyard.
Thomas H. Kirby (1824 - 1915) was the proprietor of this yard, the last to build large wooden vessels in St. Michaels, Maryland. At the turn of the century, Kirby's yard was completing its transition from shipbuilding to maintenance and repair. Subsequently, except for wartime government contracts, the county's boatbuilders would produce nothing larger than small yachts or motor work boats for oyster tongers.
Thomas Kirby and other shipbuilders who produced wooden vessels were practicing a trade in which training and business organization models had the marks of pre-industrial craft methods. Nevertheless, several of the successful builders proved quite innovative and adapted well to changes in wooden shipbuilding technology. Their ability to build vessels that were both less expensive to construct and cheaper to operate helped to boost the inland and coastwise fleet at the same time that America's merchant marine was shrinking in the face of foreign competition. I will introduce the topics of apprenticeship and training, of financing of shipbuilding yards, and of builders adapting to changes in shipbuilding technology through the careers of several prominent Chesapeake wooden shipbuilders, Robert Lambdin of St. Michaels, Thomas Kirby, John Branford of Somerset County, and Joseph W. Brooks of Dorchester County.
2. Sewell photo of St. Michaels harbor
Robert Lambdin (1799 - 1885) claimed descent from one of the longest lines of shipbuilders in Maryland, as at least three generations before him were engaged in ship construction at some point. Robert's father, William Nevill Lambdin died young, at age 29, but left a widow, Ruth Skinner Lambdin, and two sons, Robert and his younger brother William Skinner Lambdin. The widow remarried to another local shipbuilder John Graham,3 in whose shipyard Robert Lambdin went to work as an apprentice by the age of 15 along with his younger brother. Ultimately, this determined that he, too would follow the family trade and become a shipbuilder. Like most apprenticeships, they started with the dirtiest, most mundane jobs. The two boys were put to work sawing planks with a two-man rip saw set up on 6-foot trestles or benches. A log was hoisted atop the trestles, then one boy stood on top to lift the saw up by its tiller, while the other in alternation pulled the saw down, making the cut. Because there were no steam sawmills available, all shipbuilders had to saw planks by hand, so this tedious job was the first trade practiced by the apprentices. As their training continued, they learned the use of the adze and other tools to skillfully shape timbers, masts, and various spars.4 Robert Lambdin's apprenticeship apparently lasted five years, a typical length for the day.
Robert Lambdin left St. Michaels in 1819 at the age of 20 to work as a journeyman ship carpenter in Baltimore. Two years later he established a yard on Block Street, at the foot of Jones Falls, with Samuel Butler as his partner.5 Shipbuilding in Baltimore was depressed in these years following the crash of 1819, and the young Butler and Lambdin firm probably had few contracts for new construction. In the earlier years, they may have been engaged in piece work for other yards or in vessel repair. After shipbuilding began to revive in the 1830s, they built at least five vessels in Baltimore between 1836 and 1839.
By 1840 Robert Lambdin had severed his partnership with Butler. Samuel Butler continued to operate a yard in Baltimore, and Lambdin returned to his native St. Michaels. He leased the waterfront land at the foot of Mulberry Street, immediately adjacent to his house, for use as a shipyard. For forty-five years, Lambdin constructed vessels at his small Mulberry Street yard ranging in type from small, flat-bottomed oyster tonging boats to the schooners, pungies, sloops, and bugeyes of his day.
Lambdin trained several shipbuilders by taking on apprentices. He taught all five of his sons the shipbuilding trade and took other apprentices as well, including Thomas H. Kirby, whose career I will outline later.
Lambdin's oldest son, George Washington Lambdin (1832 - 1890) went to Baltimore shipyards during the Civil War, along with Thomas Kirby. After the war, the two returned to St. Michaels and built the schooner Senora. Kirby then set up his own yard in St. Michaels. George W. Lambdin rejoined his father's yard, and in 1865 became a partner in the yard along with another brother, William Adolphus Lambdin (1836 - 1903).6 Thereafter, the firm was known as Robert Lambdin and Sons, and by 1869 the three principals -- Robert, George, and William -- together signed the master carpenter certificates for new vessels. William left the partnership in 1880, but George remained until his father's death in 1885, and the yard turned out two final vessels before it closed in 1886.
3. R.D. Lambdin
Robert Dawson Lambdin (1849 - 1938), the fourth son of Robert Lambdin, began his apprenticeship in 1865, just about the time his older brother George was returning from Baltimore.7 Apparently, his apprenticeship was little different from the one served his father. This son later recalled part of his training: "I started my apprenticeship . . . scarcely seventeen years old, went to work in Holland's Point woods to get timber."8 Like his father, Robert D. Lambdin would first have to learn to select and cut timber for the yard. However, he was spared from much of the labor of hand sawing ship planks.
4. Tunis Mill
The W. W. Tunis sawmill had opened in 1864 at the head of Leed's Creek, just opposite St. Michaels on the Miles River. Unlike the earlier sawmills in the area, this one had a large gang saw that was capable of sawing lumber of any length.9 From this point, the shipyards in St. Michaels had a local source of sawn lumber. Nevertheless, there was still plenty for young shipbuilding apprentices to learn in selecting and shaping timbers, bending planks, and caulking.
Robert Dawson Lambdin's apprenticeship lasted about four years until he was lured away in 1869 to find work in the Washington Navy yard for wages of $3.25 a day, later in life returning to St. Michaels to build log canoes. When he died in 1938, the five generation line of Lambdin family shipbuilders came to an end.
5. Kirby and Lang billhead
Thomas Kirby apprenticed with Robert Lambdin in St. Michaels, worked in Baltimore during the Civil War, and returned to a rented waterfront lot in his native town after the war to begin building boats on his own account. In 1870 Kirby moved his yard across St. Michaels harbor to the former yard of Edward Willey, and five years later he purchased the site.10
At this point, I will turn from the apprenticeship question and look at how the trained shipwright purchased and improved his own shipyard, using the examples of Kirby of St. Michaels and Benson of Oxford.
6. Yacht on Kirby railway
Kirby acquired the yard by forming a partnership with Frederick Lang, a Baltimore vessel owner and investor, and for the next fifteen years the yard traded as Kirby & Lang. Lang, a German immigrant to Baltimore, rapidly worked his way up in the shipping trade to master of a vessel, then owner and master, and finally owner of a small fleet of vessels before he entered the shipyard partnership with Kirby. Lang himself was one of the yard's best customers during the fifteen years that he had a financial interest in it. Lang owned all or part of six vessels launched by the yard, ending with his yacht Montour. 11
7. Pungy on Kirby railway
The shipbuilding business grew and contracted with the cycles of the economy and the oyster fishery, while repair work provided a steadier income. One of the first improvements Kirby and Lang made to their yard was the installation of a horse-powered marine railway.12 By the time Kirby installed his, marine railways were available in most of the principal Eastern Shore towns: Oxford, Cambridge, Bethel, Sharptown, Whitehaven, Crisfield, and Newtown (later renamed Pocomoke City). 13 However, until the twentieth century, Kirby's was the only marine railway at St. Michaels and for many miles around.
8. Kirby & Sons billhead
Kirby managed to buy out Lang in 1890 and made two of his sons partners, renaming the firm Thomas H. Kirby and Sons. The entry of the sons into the partnership followed the most common pattern in wooden shipbuilding, in which ownership was held within a single family. Kirby likely took his sons into partnership not because they could offer capital for additional investment in the yard, but more as a means of a generational transfer of ownership. The yard received no major capital improvements in its later years while the sons were partners.
9. Jamaica Point yard
The pattern was the same for a yard on the other side of the county from Kirby. Just after the Civil War, William P. Benson (1827 - 1913) joined with his former supervisor Nathaniel Leonard (1820 - 1906) to establish their own shipyard in Oxford, taking farmer and tanyard owner Col. Henry E. Bateman (1807-1892) as a third partner in the new venture.14 In 1870 Leonard withdrew from shipbuilding to run a nearby mill, and thereafter the yard traded as Benson and Bateman. Benson remained the superintending shipbuilder and Bateman, the silent partner.
10. Benson's marine railway
In about 1869, the partnership invested in a marine railway to haul vessels out of the water for maintenance. It was the first in any yard on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. Marine railways had begun appearing in the Chesapeake's port cities in the 1830s, and by 1851 there were no fewer than nine in Baltimore, but more isolated towns around the Chesapeake did not begin to see them until after the Civil War.15 In the post-Civil War shipbuilding depression, Baltimore marine railways began requiring that all repair work be done by the yard that hauled the vessel out, not by the vessel's crew. This tended to drive some of the business to small Eastern Shore yards, creating an impetus to install new railways.16 A marine railway was a considerable capital investment of $3,000 to $4,000, and without the financial partner, Benson would likely have been unable to install such a piece of equipment.
11. Benson billhead
When Benson set out to run his own yard, he managed to do so by taking on partners, and he was able to buy Bateman out and become a sole proprietor only late in his career, in 1889, after his shipbuilding activity had dropped off and his yard had come to rely principally on repair work.
12. Branford and workers with tools on Annie Bennett, 1898
Finnish immigrant John Branford's yard at Fairmount in Somerset County on Maryland's Eastern Shore exemplifies the minimum investment required. The stocks or launching ways where Branford (1855-1943) built his boats were on a low piece of level ground. An 8-foot by 12-foot shed housed the tools for Branford and his hired hands. An unroofed 10-foot by 20-foot platform, raised about two feet off the ground, served as his scrive board, in the absence of mold loft, where the curves of a new vessel were drawn full size. He had no machinery, not even a circular saw.17 Branford's own tool chest and hand tools are preserved in the collections of the Maryland Historical Society: broadax and adzes, planes, chisels, slicks, and augers, to name a few, but he had no steam or other powered machinery.18 In a 1900 census report, Branford reported the value of his yard's land at $200 and buildings at $800. His cash, accounts payable, and raw materials on hand amounted to another $300, for a total investment of $1,300 at the height of his career.19
Branford worked during a transitional time in the development of Chesapeake Bay vessels, and his career is one of the best illustrations of how a shipbuilder in this region adapted to new techniques.
13. Branford portrait: change in technology
Like Lambdin, John Branford did not have easy access to sawmill-cut lumber when he opened his Somerset County yard. During his career, however, the craftsmanship required to build a bugeye gave way to simpler construction methods and sawmill-cut lumber for the building of skipjacks. Few boatbuilders that excelled at building the older bugeyes continued to thrive by constructing skipjacks. Branford was the notable exception.
A post-Civil War boom in the oyster industry sparked a demand for small, handy, shoal draft sailing vessels. A new type, the bugeye, met the need, ideally suited to oystering and to the Chesapeake. The bugeye was large enough to pull heavy dredges over the oyster bars and carry about 300 to 800 bushels of oysters. With three jib-headed sails on two raking masts, the bugeye was easy to handle with minimal crew. Its extreme shoal draft allowed the bugeye to harbor in small, shallow, Eastern Shore creeks and harbors.
Branford's earlier bugeyes were built with log bottoms, but most other builders were abandoning log construction during the 1880s. Log construction wastes a large amount of wood, reduced to chips by the builder's adz. With the spread of steam saw mills into the rural counties of the Eastern Shore in the second half of the nineteenth century, sawn lumber became increasingly available, and builders began building bugeyes in the conventional plank-on-frame manner. Until sawmills made sawn lumber in large dimensions available to shipbuilders, it was less labor-intensive, and therefore less costly, to hew a hull out of logs. Although watermen generally preferred log boats over frame ones, the near exhaustion of the supply of large pine trees that provided the logs forced builders to use sawn lumber instead.20 As a rule, frame-built bugeyes cost more than twice as much, but could be built longer than the natural limitations on boats built with logs. From 1894 to the end of his career, Branford constructed his bugeyes in plank-on-frame fashion.
The bank panic of 1893 and the ensuing economic depression hit the Chesapeake's shipbuilding industries hard, so orders for new boats dropped off. To make matters worse, the mid-1890s saw oyster harvests drop to unprecedented lows as the Chesapeake's formerly rich oyster beds approached exhaustion. New boat orders dropped off for a few years, but in 1896 the wooden shipbuilders began to build again for the oystermen.
The shipbuilding activity of the late 1890s, however, produced a new type of boat. Bateau construction had been introduced into Chesapeake waters during the 1880s, probably following V-bottom boats that had been brought to the bay from southern New England.21 This new type of boat, now widely known as the skipjack, was never widespread in New England or New York, but rapidly became the favorite on the Chesapeake.
Bateau or "deadrise" construction required fewer materials in the framing of a boat, and the boatbuilding technique was somewhat simpler. At $600 to $800, the ones Branford built cost only about half of what he charged for a frame-built bugeye. Watermen ordered these new, inexpensive "two sail bateaux" for working the oyster beds. Five years later, these new bateaux had attracted the attention of a Baltimore Sun reporter, who mistakenly called them "skipjacks," the name given to smaller handscraping bateaux used in the Crisfield area. The name stuck, although it was slow to gain acceptance on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland. Generally speaking, bugeyes were better dredge boats than skipjacks, but skipjacks were adequate for the job and cost only half as much, so they came to prevail.
For 15 years, new skipjacks were built in large numbers: at least 300 and possibly upwards of 600 were built. As with the bugeyes, more skipjacks were built in Somerset County than in any other area. Some of the earliest skipjacks came from the town of Oriole on St. Peters Creek, a branch of the Manokin River, just a short distance from John Branford's yard.
16. Annie Bennett ready to launch, 1898
Branford himself quickly turned out two of these "two-sail bateaux" (or skipjacks) in 1896, and a third in 1897. Demand apparently soared, and he built three in 1898 and five more in 1899. Again, Branford started using a single design for multiple vessels, building six skipjacks from the same half model: Addie Branford, Gertrude Wands, Marcus, Freddie L. Bennett, Mildred Bennett, and Willie L. Bennett--a means of saving time by not designing each one individually. Seen here is his second-largest, Annie Bennett on the stocks and ready for launching in 1898.
Branford was an unusually prolific builder of both bugeyes and skipjacks. He built at least twenty-five bugeyes, thirteen skipjacks, and two motor vessels. Only one other builder, M. M. Davis of Solomons, is known to have built more bugeyes, and no other builder is known to have built more skipjacks than Branford.22 Branford was remarkably versatile; no other Chesapeake bugeye builder adapted to building skipjacks in large numbers.
17. Brooks: Mattie F. Dean
One shipbuilder who out-produced Branford was Joseph W. Brooks of Dorchester County, who had a larger and more heavily capitalized yard than Branford. Brooks stands out as one of the largest and most successful wooden shipbuilders on the Eastern Shore. In his shipbuilding career, Brooks is said to have launched as many as ten vessels a year, totaling over 150 bay schooners, pungies, sloops, and bugeyes.
What made Brooks such a successful and prolific shipbuilder? His vessels were well-constructed and several were quite fast, but Brooks was a good businessman, too. Like Branford, Brooks adapted to changes in the industry around the turn of the century by building different types, although he never turned out a skipjack. He also diversified beyond ship construction by adding a steam sawmill to his operation. By building sound vessels, adapting to changing markets for vessels, and diversifying his business, Brooks established himself as the leading builder of wooden vessels in Maryland.
Brooks was born in 1832 near Parsons Creek in Dorchester County. Beginning at age 17, he apprenticed for four years to his uncle George Brooks, a ship carpenter, much like Robert Lambdin. Brooks gave himself more of an education than this would suggest. He learned more of the principles of naval architecture than was typical of builders of small wooden ships in his day. He possessed and used John W. Griffith's influential text Marine and Naval Architecture at a time when few Chesapeake shipbuilders had any theoretical background in ship design. 23
18. Amanda F. Lewis
By 1868 Brooks had begun supervising the construction of vessels when he launched the pungies J. W. Brooks and Levin A. Insley. Pungies were the workhorses of the bay in the middle 19th century. With relatively deep keels, sharp lines, and two high, raking masts, these fast sailers were employed in trade up and down the bay and for oyster dredging fishery in the winter months, at least until bugeyes were built in large numbers.
19. Fanny Insley
Over the next two decades Brooks became one of the most respected shipbuilders on the bay. An 1885 Cambridge newspaper advertisement attests to his reputation within Dorchester County. An estate sale featured "the schooner H. M. Rowe, built by Jos. W. Brooks two years ago: will carry 1700 bushels of oysters, and is in first-class order; is one of the fastest boats on the Chesapeake." 24
20. L.F. Petty
Brooks came to building the Chesapeake's quintessential oystering boats, the bugeyes, rather late. His first, named Joseph W. Brooks, slipped down the ways in 1880. Until this time, bugeyes were built with log hulls, but Brooks built his first bugeye in the plank-on-frame method that was conventional for the schooners and sloops of the day. Brooks built other innovative bugeyes in the succeeding few years. One of the problems with bugeyes was the lack of deck space aft on the traditional sharp sterns, which he addressed by constructing bugeyes with sterns that were more conventional on schooners of the day. Brooks built the round-stern bugeye Woolford in 1883, and the same year he also experimented with adding a square or transom stern to the bugeyes Lottie L. Thomas and Ivy L. Leonard. 25
21. Sketch of tug Irene from Brooks account journal
Absent from the list of some 150 boats built by Brooks is any example of a skipjack. Brooks may have seen better opportunities in building new motor vessels, such as this tug, probably the Irene built in 1901. The first years of the twentieth century were boom times for skipjack construction, but the older Brooks, who was clearly a talented builder, may have looked askance at cheap deadrise construction as a weak, inferior, and inexpert way to build a boat. John Branford would certainly have differed with him on this point.
22. Brooks railway ad
Brooks prospered in part by diversifying his operation. In 1885 Brooks moved his yard and built a marine railway at the new site. By June of that year the railway was fully operational, which allowed Brooks to maintain boats by hauling them out of the water.26 The marine railway would provide steady work for the yard in years when there were few orders for new vessels. Many of Brooks's own vessels returned every year to be hauled out. Within a year or two Brooks added a steam-powered band saw to the shipyard.
Brooks' sawmill was in operation by 1877, adjacent to his shipyard. The lumber used by his shipyard alone was probably not sufficient to justify the purchase of a steam sawmill, but by employing a separate gang to operate the saw, he created an efficiency for his shipbuilding operation. Rather than paying for sawn lumber, he could procure logs and use his own laborers to turn them into lumber. By 1880 Brooks was operating a second sawmill in another part of Dorchester County.
The sawmill and steam bandsaw were used for contract jobs in addition to his own shipbuilding activities. Just after the turn of the century Brooks provided the frames for several menhaden steamers for Baltimore shipbuilder William Brusstar. Several wooden shipbuilders in the late nineteenth century turned to subcontractors to find suitable frame timber, and Brooks took advantage of this new specialization within the shipbuilding industry.28 He was probably better positioned to provide these frames to Brusstar than other Eastern Shore shipbuilders because he possessed a sawmill.
Although Brooks sawed his own lumber, his yard could not produce everything for his vessels. The ironwork was generally provided by Sid Hallowell, a Cambridge blacksmith. A Mr. Rohde built the yawl boats for Brooks' vessels. The yard was certainly not equipped for any sophisticated metalwork, so the tugs were delivered without engines.29
23. Bow of Thomas M. Freeman
Brooks's boats stand out in one interesting respect: the extent of their ornamentation. His boats usually bore the carved and painted trailboards and small figureheads typical of Chesapeake Bay boats, but several were more elaborately ornamented. Amanda F. Lewis had not only carved trailboards, but an elaborate stern relief carving with the head of a woman that survives in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. These carvings were provided by Hammond Skinner, a ship carpenter from nearby Town Point on the Little Choptank River.30 The square-rigged bugeye Lottie L. Thomas and the schooner Mattie F. Dean each had a figure of a woman for a masthead ornament. The masthead figure from Lottie L. Thomas, with an upraised arm bearing a sword, survives in the collections of the Maryland Historical Society. It is thought to have been carved by an African-American named Cook who made carvings on the Chesapeake for some years.31 Skinner and Cook probably acted as independent subcontractors to Brooks in providing carved work that could not be provided by shipyard laborers, much like the Cambridge blacksmith that provided metalwork to the yard.
Together, the experiences of these shipbuilders tell us much about the wooden shipbuilding industry on the Chesapeake. Lambdin's apprenticeship and his subsequent training of apprentices helps us understand the training these men received. Kirby and Benson each demonstrate the business relationships that were forged to enable a yard's productivity. Branford offers an outstanding example of adaptation to changes in technology, and Brooks shows us an alternative to Branford's choices. Brook's experience in diversifying his activities from shipbuilding into sawmilling and the specialized work he did in producing frames for a Baltimore shipbuilder demonstrate a business sophistication that was only occasionally seen among the Chesapeake's rural shipbuilders.
1 Robert Barrie, "The Chesapeake Again," in Robert Barrie and George Barrie, Jr., Cruises, Mainly on the Bay of the Chesapeake. (Bryn Mawr: The Franklin Press, 1909), 50.
2 Edward B. Watkins, St. Michaels Reminiscences (n.p.: the author, 1976), 6.
3 Robert Dawson Lambdin, "Early Ship-Building in Maryland: A Special Reference to the Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe: Autobiography of Robert Dawson Lambdin," ts (April 1935), 3, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) vertical file; John Graham is credited with constructing at least one vessel, possibly the schooner Alpha or Alphia, in partnership with Peter Denny Lambdin (a second cousin to Robert Lambdin) in 1833. See Talbot County Land Records (TCLR) JL 51 / 279 Bill of Sale; compare Oxford enrollment no. 60, 26 Aug. 1833.
4 Lambdin, "Early Ship-Building in Maryland," 3-4.
5 R. D. Lambdin, "Boat Building of Yesterday in Talbot," St. Michaels Comet (10 Jan. 1925).
6 Robert D. Lambdin, "Veteran Boat Builder Tells of Talbot's Famous Canoes," Easton Star-Democrat (29 Sept. 1926).
7 Robert D. Lambdin, "Talbot Countian Still Building Canoes at 82," Star-Democrat (20 Nov. 1930.
8 R. D. L[ambdin], "Older Builder Writes of Early Sailing Vessels," Star-Democrat [?], clipping in scrapbook compiled by John G. Earle, author's collection.
9 Lambdin, "Boat Building of Yesterday in Talbot."
10 Pete Lesher, "Edward Willey and the Revival of Shipbuilding in St. Michaels," The Weather Gauge XXXI: 2 (Fall 1995), 24.
11 Pete Lesher, "Thomas Kirby and the Decline of Shipbuilding in Talbot County," Maryland Historical Magazine 97:3 (Fall 2002), 362.
12 Pete Lesher, "Oxford's Shipyard: Benson & Bateman," The Weather Gauge XXXIII:1 (Spring 1997), 13; Hall, 34.
13 Lambdin, "Early Ship-Building in Maryland," 5; The 1877 Atlases and Other Early Maps of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (Salisbury, Md.: The Wicomico Bicentennial Commission, 1976), 21, 32, 37, 77.
14 Eastern Shore Whig, 30 Nov. 1930, 1 Nov. 1831, 22 April 1834; Talbot County Land Records, Liber 72, Folio 127 (recorded 4 Oct. 1865).
15 John G. B. Hutchins, The American Maritime Industries and Public Policy, 1789-1914. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), 108; Thompson's Mercantile and Professional Directory . . . 1851-52. (Baltimore, William Thompson, 1851), 65.
16 Henry Hall, Report on the Ship-Building Industry of the United States. Tenth Census, Vol. VIII (Washington: 1882), 127.
17 M. V. Brewington, Chesapeake Bay Log Canoes and Bugeyes (Cambridge, Md.: Cornell Maritime Press, 1963), 72.
18 The Marion V. Brewington Chesapeake Bay Collection (Baltimore: The Maryland Historical Society, n.d.), 12.
19 US Census Special Schedule No. 28, Brewington Collection, Calvert Marine Museum, Box 1, Folder 4.
20 Hall, 38.
21 Howard I. Chapelle, American Small Sailing Craft (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951), 308-9.
22 Hutchins, 394.
23 Marion V. Brewington manuscript collection, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (C.B.M.M.).
24 Cambridge Democrat and News, 14 March 1885.
25 Brewington, Chesapeake Bay Log Canoes and Bugeyes, 47, 48.
26 Advertisement, Cambridge Democrat and News (6 June 1885).
27 Brewington collection, C.B.M.M.
28 Hutchins, 387-8.
29 Brewington collection, C.B.M.M.
30 M. V. Brewington, Chesapeake Bay: A Pictorial Maritime History. (Cambridge, Md.: Cornell Maritime Press, 1953), 164.
31 Gabrielle M. Hamilton, "Something Extra: Traditional Decorative Carvings on Chesapeake Bay Dredge Boats," The Weather Gauge XXXIV:1 (Spring 1998), 1; Edwin W. Beitzell, Life on the Potomac River. (Abell, Md.: E. W. Beitzell, 1968), 58.