![]() Its keelson was hewn out of a natural crook of loblolly pine. One of the oldest crabbing skiffs he measured was a Chesapeake Bay flattie (small sailing craft with flat bottom forward and v-bottom or “deadrise” aft) built at Bishop’s Heads about 1897. Maritime historian Howard Chapelle documented loblolly use in Eastern Shore sailing workboats which he surveyed and measured in the 1940s. White oak was sometimes used for the stem post, stern post or transom, and frames. Loblolly was used almost exclusively for planking, keelson, chine and sheer logs, deck beams, and centerboard cases. ![]() ![]() The most abundant and readily available wood was loblolly – “Eastern Shore yellow pine” as Smith Islanders call it. Unlike large shipbuilders who could import the best materials, boatbuilders at smaller yards on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and watermen and farmers building their own skiffs, used the best local wood they could find. These southern states also exported longleaf to shipyards in Philadelphia, New York, and New England, and overseas. For three centuries, shipbuilders at Baltimore and Norfolk imported vast quantities of longleaf from North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. But longleaf’s native range does not extend as far north as the Chesapeake. For these vessels, the preferred pine species for framing and planking was longleaf pine. This was probably true for larger coasting and trans-oceanic vessels built at Baltimore, Norfolk, and other major shipbuilding centers. Another wrote that longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) was the preference of workboat builders on the Eastern Shore. According to one source, loblolly was used “only for interior work and cheap construction” in Chesapeake Bay sailing craft. There is a misunderstanding among some local historians about loblolly in traditional Chesapeake Bay sailing workboats. This tradition continued at Smith Island into the 1980s, but it will probably die there as watermen turn to fiberglass boats – or turn to other ways of making a living. Plank-on-frame crabbing skiffs and the larger crab-scrapes, deadrise workboats, and skipjacks were built mostly with loblolly through the 1950s. Few log canoes were built after 1920 when trees large enough even for three- and five-log canoes became too hard to find. Lacking sawmills, the first Maryland colonists learned to burn and hew canoes from the logs of loblolly and poplar trees that grew up to 5 feet in diameter. On the Chesapeake, it was loblolly pine and white oak. In the mid-Atlantic, it was cedar and sand pine. In New England, they were built of eastern white pine and tamarack. Before 1940, almost all small workboats in America were built of local wood species.
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