Boatbuilding in Shady Side

Boatbuilding was an important backyard industry in Shady Side for the last century and often provided a better living than fishing, with local families passing down know-how, skills, and tools from one generation to the next. Builders there included the Nieman brothers, who made rowboats, workboats, and cruisers, and Captain Charles Edward Leatherbury, who was known for log canoes and deadrise bateaux, along with Harold Holland, Charlie Smith, George Proctor, Perry and Leonard Rogers, and Wil Lee. Inspired by his automobile, Captain Perry Rogers developed a new kind of workboat, a deadrise with a tuck stern and a motor, and in 1904 he designed and built the first boat later known as a West River Boat, the Princess. At 40 feet long and costing $300, the Princess was much larger than the average workboat, was known as the ship, and provided a stable platform for tonging oysters in the shallow waters of the West River. Rogers’s design was one of many unique local power workboat styles that emerged among Chesapeake Bay boatbuilders in the 1920s, and he continued building West River deadrises throughout his life, including the Edna Florence in 1933. A deadrise has a V-shaped bottom and a sharp angle where the bottom meets the side, and Rogers built his with a tuck stern, angled outward from the waterline and not deep, a form that helped the boat hold position on oysters when tonging. Chesapeake builders such as Rogers found that longer boats, about 35 to 45 feet, were more stable when anchored in the Bay’s short, choppy waves, while still needing to be large enough to carry a day’s catch safely without becoming too expensive to build or maintain.

Shady Side, Maryland · United States