CURATOR’S CORNER: HISTORIC PHOTOS FROM THE A RCHIVES
photo by frank a. moorshead jr. collection of the chesapeake bay maritime museum, 0886.0003.
During the Council of American Maritime Museums (CAMM) tour of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum last spring, Chief Curator Pete Lesher (and CAMM board VP) showed us some compelling historic photos in the museum’s collections storage area. While available to researchers upon request, these photos don’t often see the light of day, so we decided to create a series in Sea History in which curators pick a particularly interesting, revealing, or representative photo from their archives and tell us about it. Enjoy!
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Oxford, Maryland, in Transition—Town Creek, 1939
n 1939, 21-year-old Frank A. Moorshead Jr. climbed Oxford’s water tower to capture this view of Oxford Ship Yards, now Safe Harbor Oxford. Moorshead’s conversion of his 1888 pungy yacht, Kessie C. Price, from a commercial sailing vessel to a recreational boat, was symbolic of the changes taking place at this historic shipyard as businesses shifted their orientation from fishing, crabbing, and oystering to servicing leisure vessels. In the foreground is a shed with a second-story sail loft once operated by English-born sailmaker David Pritchard. Pritchard, who died two years before this photo was snapped, had learned his trade in square riggers but came ashore around 1884 to work in Oxford. Perhaps Pritchard’s greatest legacy was his apprentice, Oxford native Downes Curtis, an African-American who took over Pritchard’s loft and built sails there for the Chesapeake sailing community until his death in 1996. Beyond the sail loft are the three marine railways belonging to Oxford Ship Yards, operated by J. Ramsey Speer, who sold the yard in 1940. The renamed Oxford Boatyard subsequently expanded to fulfill World War II military boatbuilding contracts. On the left, a bugeye—the quintessential Chesapeake oyster dredging vessel—is hauled out on the large marine railway with its mainmast removed. The age of commercial sail on the Chesapeake was extended almost to the end of the 20th century by a Maryland
law that permitted oyster dredging only by sailing vessels. On the T-head pier is the 1901 round-stern bugeye Margaret A. Travers, built for sail but, like many of its contemporaries, converted to power with a wheelhouse on the after deck and a shortened mast supporting a steadying sail forward. On the same pier is a mast derrick removed from the deck of a cargo steamer and repurposed for yard work, where it remained in use until the summer of 2022. Just to the left of the derrick, two or three Hoopers Island draketail workboats are tied up to the A. B. Harris Ice Company, which packed oysters in the winter and crabmeat in the summer. The painted lettering of “A. B. Harris, Oysters” is barely visible on the white roof of one of its buildings. On the eve of World War II, Harris was one of about half a dozen seafood packing houses in Oxford. Today, none survive. To the right of the oyster packing house is the wreck of the 1873 keel schooner C. W. Willey, built in nearby St. Michaels and abandoned in Town Creek. Its trailboards survive as part of the collection at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. At the top is the residential neighborhood of Stewart’s Island, now largely occupied by a marina and connected to the rest of Oxford by a narrow causeway. The scene today is no less busy, but dominated by recreational boating. —Pete Lesher, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum offers exhibitions and programs for youth and adults on its 18-acre waterfront campus in St. Michaels, Maryland. Its shipyard maintains 10 historic vessels afloat, and recently completed construction of the new pinnace, Maryland Dove. CBMM’s more than 61,000 catalogued photographs can be searched online at collections.cbmm.org. 34
SEA HISTORY 180, AUTUMN 2022