Pocomoke Shipbuilding • Vane Brothers - Chesapeake Bay ...

the Future
ers long-range plan to modernize and standardize
its fleet of 60 vessels.
Hughes, 49, the third-generation of
his family to run Vane Brothers, says the
company is building 15 news tugs and
eight barges. The company that had
five employees when it incorporated
in 1958 now has 450 workers, 300
of them deployed in the fleet.
Vane Brothers is a company
that has lasted more than a century
because it has been constantly
changing, adapting and innovating.
The story of the company
and the families who built and
run it, is chronicled
in “Time
and the Tide: A Centennial History of the Vane
Brothers Company,” an in-house publication by
Mary Butler Davies the company published in
1998 to mark its 100th birthday.
Established by brothers William Burke Vane
and Allen P. Vane as a ships’ chandlery in Fells
Point, the company has moved around the harbor
and shifted direction and focus several times, but
it has long remained a vital part of Baltimore’s
attachment to the sea.
The company sold everything a ship and its
crew would need, from coffee to compasses to
carpentry tools. Vane Brothers was a sailor’s
Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Safeway and social
hall, all under one roof.
Schooner Captain D’Arcy Grant, known as
“Miss Stormy,” wrote an article for the Baltimore
Sun in 1940 about the importance of Vane
Brothers as a place to gather and share stories.
“Midway of the store is the ‘social circle.’ Its
center is a stove, and in the winter, the circle of
chairs surrounding it is never empty. Not too active
now, Capt. Vane presides over the forum, and
from the farthest reaches of the inland waterway,
seafaring men bring him their news and yarns.
“Vane’s is the one spot on the Eastern seaboard
where you can look forward with any hope
of certainty to meeting a sailing man you want to
see,” she wrote.
During a recent tour of the new Vane Brothers
campus, Duff Hughes met visitors in the Pot
Belly Room, a richly paneled lounge with a large
fireplace, comfortable armchairs and a sweeping
view of the harbor. He says the room is used by
sailors who carry on the tradition of the stoveside
camaraderie.
The Vanes were shipbuilders and sailors who
moved to Baltimore from Dorchester County in
the 1800s. In the 1920s, Claude Venables Hughes
and his brother, Charles Fletcher Hughes from
the Eastern Shore, joined the Vanes, believed by
family members to be distant cousins.
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