September Rivah Visitor's Guide - The Rappahannock Record

Model
Builders
photos and story by
Larry S. Chowning
For those who have built wooden boats or worked
on boats most of their lives, the art of boatbuilding
is hard to get out of one’s blood.
Model making is a good alternative to the real
thing and several longtime boatbuilders in Rivah country
now make classic deadrise style models.
When Edward Diggs, 84, of Redart in Mathews
County builds a model boat of a Chesapeake Bay
workboat, he knows firsthand the design and shape
of hull, pilothouse and decks because his hands and
fingers have touched every part of the original boat.
Most of Diggs’ models are of boats he worked on, or
of boats he built himself.
Diggs grew up among boatbuilders. He started
in the late 1920s as a child, blowing sawdust off his
father’s saw mark. When he was 16, he went to work
building boats for his father, Edgar Diggs, and his
father’s partner, Ned Hudgins.
Edgar and Ned learned to build boats as young
men under the tutelage of Ned’s father, Theopholis
Hudgins. Most of the time, they built round and
V-stern wooden boats for area commercial fishermen.
In 1951, longtime master boatbuilder Alton Smith
got a job installing a bottom on a 65-foot buyboat and
asked Edward and Edgar if they’d come to work for
him.
This was the start of a long and lasting relationship
“I build my models
identical to the way I
built my boats. They
are built as a model
to the scale of the
original boat.”
––Edward Diggs
for Edward and Alton
Smith. Smith had learned
the craft from his father
Lennie, who was a pioneer
in the early development
of wooden, deadrise, and
cross-planked boats.
When Smith retired,
Edward took over his
Horn Harbor boatyard
and worked there until he
retired in the late 1990s.
“I build my models identical to the way I built my
boats,” said Diggs at his home recently. “They are built
as a model to the scale of the original boat.”
Although he says he’s now retired from building
models, when he was active Diggs often got requests
to build a model boat from different periods in that
Building boats, both large
and small, is in their blood
Former boatbuilder Edward Diggs (above) holds a model he made of the “Lavenia H.,” a
55-foot Chesapeake Bay buyboat built in 1946 by Alton Smith who Diggs worked for from
1951 until Smith retired in the 1980s.
This stage of a model of a Chesapeake Bay buyboat by Edward Diggs shows the same type of
deck framing used to build the actual boat itself. Diggs built and repaired hundreds of deadrise
workboats before building models in retirement.
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