Pocomoke Shipbuilding • Vane Brothers - Chesapeake Bay ...

Tull launched several other sailing and
power yachts.
In addition to new construction, Tull
handled repair work on the yard’s horsepowered
marine railway. Repair work, always
steadier than new ship construction,
was a brisk business in Pocomoke City.
From the time he started, there were two
commercial marine railways in the town,
and by 1895, there were three. 12 In an 1898
newspaper notice that may have indicated
unusually high activity, the schooners
Elizabeth Ann, Jeanette, and E. H. Taylor
were all at Tull’s yard for repairs, while
four smaller vessels were at Charles W.
Crockett’s nearby marine railway. 13
Tull’s yard expanded and contracted
with the economics of shipbuilding. In the
1880s, when the oyster industry was booming, Tull launched
up to nine vessels in a year. Leaner times followed the depression
of 1893, but business again picked up a few years later.
After the turn of the century, Tull weathered the changes in
demand better than many other builders by learning to build
new types—fish steamers, power freighters, large schooners,
and schooner barges—when demand for bugeyes and
smaller schooners waned. America’s involvement in World
War I created a sudden but short-lived demand for new shipping
as war materiel was needed in Europe, and U-boats took
their toll on merchant shipping. Tull’s four schooner barges
launched in 1918 were typical of the American shipbuilding
industry’s response to the emergency call for new hulls.
The end of the war combined with surplus vessels to create a
devastating depression in the shipbuilding industry, and Tull
survived by shrinking his workforce and finding contracts
for smaller motor freight boats, yachts, and one additional
menhaden fisherman, this last one with an internal combustion
engine instead of steam. Tull died in 1924, and the yard
consequently closed.
Overall, Tull built a remarkable variety of vessels—bugeyes,
schooners, sloops, skipjacks, fish steamers, tugs, motor
freight boats, schooner barges, launches, sailing and power
yachts, barges, and a ram—some 200 in all, by a claim in his
own 1917 advertisement. Measured either by number of hulls
or total tonnage launched, no Eastern Shore shipbuilder out
produced him. This successful shipbuilder and businessman
rose to become Pocomoke City’s most prominent citizen. In
Celebrants crowd the deck of the ram
Reedville at her 1911 launch.
1901, he was elected mayor, and he served, with some interruptions
in service, up to his death. In addition to leading the
town through the typical civic improvements such as water
and sanitary service, he led the reconstruction of the downtown
after a 1922 fire.
Although owners of large shipyards were typically prominent
citizens in their communities, there is probably no parallel
on the Chesapeake to Tull’s dual dominance in Pocomoke
City’s business and civic affairs.
Sources
1. Dr. Reginald V. Truitt and Dr. Millard G. Les Callette, Worcester County: Maryland’s
Arcadia (Snow Hill, Md.: Worcester County Historical Society, 1977), 132.
2. Listed by name in the Rev. James Murray, History of Pocomoke City, Formerly New
Town (Baltimore: Curry, Clay, and Company, 1883), 92.
3. Portrait and Biographical Record of the Eastern Shore, (New York: Chapman Publishing,
1898), 799-800.
4. Howard I. Chapelle, The National Watercraft Collection (Washington, D.C.: GPO,
1960), 274-5.
5. John Frye, The Men All Singing. The Story of the Menhaden Industry (Norfolk, Va.:
Donning, 1978), 56.
6. S. S. Scott, Marine Review (Sept. 1910).
7. Quentin Snediker and Ann Jensen, Chesapeake Bay Schooners (Centreville, Md.:
Tidewater, 1992), 129.
8. Portrait and Biographical Record of the Eastern Shore, 800.
9. Truitt and Les Callette, 221.
10. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Life Worth Living. A Personal Experience (New York:
Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905), 100.
11. Dixon, 96-7.
12. Sanborn Fire Atlas for Pocomoke City, 1895
13. [Pocomoke City] Ledger-Enterprise (Sat., 8 Oct. 1898).
The bugeye A.G. Sterling at the dock
in New Point, Virginia, showing signs
of a hard life.
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