Pocomoke Shipbuilding • Vane Brothers - Chesapeake Bay ...

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As well as the chandlery, the company owned schooners
that ran the Coastal and Caribbean trade. One of their vessels,
the 200-foot-long, four-masted schooner Doris Hamlin,
sailed from Baltimore in the logwood trade to Haiti. In his
youth, Robert H. Burgess, the late Chesapeake Bay historian
and former curator of The Mariners’ Museum in Newport
News, Virginia, was a crewmember. He took numerous
photographs of his voyage. Some are on display in the new
Vane Brothers headquarters. Two brass lamps from the Doris
Hamlin flank the fireplace in the Pot Belly Room. Vane
Brothers sold the schooner in 1939 and a U-boat sank it a
few months later.
In 1941, Allen P. Vane died and Burke Vane sold the
company to the Hughes brothers.
World War II ended the schooner trade and the Hughes
brothers began to diversify their business. Davies, in her
book about the company, wrote that during the war they supplied
goods to “picketboats – private yachts commandeered
to spy on suspicious vessels and otherwise act as coastal security.
The picketboats would tie up at Pier 4 and hand over
their store lists. Without asking too many questions, Vane
C. Duff Hughes talks about the future of his family’s company in
the library designed by his mother, Betsy Hughes, a company vice
president, editor and librarian.
Brothers provisioned them and then billed the Coast Guard.
The bills were always paid.”
With the schooners gone, the working harbor fleet of
tugs and lighters became Vane Brothers’ customers, setting
the company on a course that it continues today.
After his discharge from the Navy, Charles F. Hughes Jr.
attended Johns Hopkins University, but left school to join
the family business. He received his bachelor’s degree from
JHU in 1951.
Under his direction, Vane Brothers continued to evolve.
By the early 1970s, the 42,000-gallon tanker, Duff, was added
to the fleet to supply fuel to ships in the harbor. The company
continued to add tugs and specialty tankers. They delivered
potable water and marine lubricants directly to ships.
Duff Hughes says he grew up on the docks and decks
of Vane Brothers and joined his father and grandfather in
1980 after graduating from Denison University. He worked
in the fleet and received his 100-ton Coast Guard license
four years later. In 1991, Duff Hughes was named president
of the company.
He says one of the business decisions that paid off for
Vane Brothers was the purchase of a double-hulled
oil barge in 1987.
“We started early,” Duff Hughes says. “We
were already in the double-hull business” when the
massive Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in March
of 1989. He says the company is on course to have
a double-hulled fleet in place well before the 2015
federal deadline.
As Hughes walks from one building to another
on his campus, employees greet him by name and
he banters easily with them. Workers regularly refer
Vane Brothers operates a fleet of double-hulled barges to
transport petroleum products.