THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996 TAG: 9602260039
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 137 lines
For somebody, somewhere, every boat is a dream come true.
Ninety-two years ago a Camden County craftsman named Alvirah Wright took a razor-sharp hatchet and began hewing out cedar and cypress ribs for a new shad boat.
And last week the 1904 shad boat set sail again from a temporary dryland mooring at the Museum of the Albemarle on U.S. Route 17 south.
The vessel is on its way to a rebuild and restoration that will fulfill a few more dreams in the long history of Alvirah's old workboat.
Last Thursday the nameless 27-foot 9-inch shadboat was winched aboard a tilt-and-roll-back flatbed truck and then hauled to the foot of Ehringhaus Street, where a new $750,000 Museum of the Albemarle will eventually be built on the site of the old Davenport Motors building. The boat is on blocks in the Davenport building where the restoration will take place.
Most old time, eyeball-only shipwrights could freehand a hull with near-perfect lines, and that's what Alvirah Wright did when he built his boat back in the beginning of this century.
In those days a shadboat was a kind of marine pickup that could go fishing in all kinds of weather and also carry most of the other commerce of North Carolina's shallow sounds and rivers. Wright's legendary skill made his shadboats famous for seaworthiness and speed under sail.
Through the years, Alvirah's workboat showed her stern to many another shadboat hurrying home with a load of fish. Or watermelons. Or fresh-logged lumber. Or anything else that had to go to market.
``We've always wanted one of these traditional craft for permanent exhibition when we open the new museum,'' said Don W. Pendergraft, an Albemarle Museum curator, who designs exhibits.
``Shadboats played an important role in the history of this region.''
The North Carolina Division of Archives and History has contributed $5,000 to begin repairing and restoring Wright's shadboat to 1904 perfection. When the new museum is completed, the craft will be the centerpiece for a grand entrance display - just like the Nike ``Winged Victory'' statue in the Louvre.
Wright was born in 1869 in Camden County when folks were still in bloody shock from the civil war that had just ended.
He died at 92, full of honors for his skill at building boats and anything else that caught his fancy: Decoys, for instance. Alvirah was widely admired as a man who could rough out a canvasback decoy with an ax, smooth it with a spokeshave, and paint it so true that ducks whistled in by the hundreds.
Nearly all of the 300 decoys Wright carved between 1900 and 1925 were easily recognized by their wide canvasback tails and high, saucy heads. The decoys were a metaphor for Alvirah's shad boats, which were wide in the stern to carry heavy loads and high in the bows to fling aside the steepseas of Albemarle Sound.
The first shadboat was probably built around 1870 on Roanoke Island by George Washington Creef. Like Wright, Creef was a famous wooden-boatbuilder who made each of his boats a little better than the previous one.
Creef developed the shadboat to handle boisterous weather that Carolina sounds often whip up to make local fishermen go to church on Sunday. The boats were framed with natural crooks taken out of cypress or cedar buttress roots and the cedar planking made a light and buoyant craft that didn't rot.
Shadboats were round-bottomed and smooth (Carvel) planked. Each plank was so carefully fitted to its neighbor that no caulking or seam-battens were needed because the boat swelled watertight with use.
Pendergraft thinks the beautiful wineglass stern on Alvirah's boat is a mite more angular than those formed by Creef down on Roanoke Island.
But those sterns were one of the great secrets of shadboats. When the wind piped up and the mains'l put the lee rail down, reserve buoyancy in that aft wineglass section kicked up the shad-lady's skirts to allow hissing waves to harmlessly slide under and away.
Sometime around 1912, the Wright boat got one of those newfangled gas engines but it probably didn't move the hull any faster than the original lug-sail did when the wind piped up. Most shadboats were sloop-rigged with a single sprit mainsail and a small jib forward of the single mast. Some carried a huge topsail rigged above the mainsail.
Old records haven't been sorted out as yet, but apparently Alvirah's boat worked for several owners before Alvirah's late son, Edmund Wright, recognized the boat as one of his father's creations.
Edmund Wright was another dreamer. He, too, was a boat builder, taught by a father who was a fourth generation Irish shipwright. Edmund didn't waste any time buying back his father's shadboat and bringing it home to Camden.
Through ensuing decades vines and birds and shy wild creatures that know a safe harbor when they see one kept watch over Alvirah's old boat while it slowly disappeared under a canopy of green.
Then, four years ago, Curtis Edwards, a maternal grandson of Alvirah Wright, was working at the Museum of the Albemarle when he overheard Pendergraft talking about staff hopes for an old shadboat to add to the museum's collection.
``Hey, my grandmother has one right in her backyard over in Camden,'' said Edwards, and yet another dream was shaping up.
Pendergraft and Wayne Matthews, the museum's expert-on-everything, hurried across the Pasquotank River to Camden, where they found that yes, Elizabeth Wright, the widow of Edmund, had Alvirah's shadboat as well as an old 14-foot cedar skiff that had never gone near the water.
``We had to cut a trail to get back to the boat,'' said Matthews, whose enthusiasm for the boat helped get the state grant for the restoration.
Frankie Meads, who runs Albemarle Builders Supply next to the present museum, solved the problem of getting the boat out of the woods with the tilt-and-roll-on truck he used in the lumber yard.
When Meads returned with the truck last week to move the shadboat downtown for rebuilding, a bystander yelled:
``Drive slow and be careful, Frankie, that's a very conservative old boat!''
Meads is a Republican Party leader in the Albemarle.
Alvirah's boat is in the hands of Enno Reckendorf, a present-day shipwright who once operated a wooden-boat building school in Norfolk. Reckendorf is a resident oracle at the Pelican Marina across the river from downtown Elizabeth City.
``It's all volunteer work and first we'll have to let the boat dry out for several months,'' Reckendorf said.
Museum officials estimate it will take an additional $20,000 to complete the restoration of Wright's shadboat and nobody has the slightest idea of where the money is coming from.
Reckendorf isn't worried.
``Old boats have a way of bringing out the best in people,'' he said.
Reckendorf is a tall, spare man and behind him is a lifetime of callous-sprouting work around wooden boats.
The few remaining master shipwrights the world over seem to have a clannish resemblance to each other, and Reckendorf looks a little like Alvirah Wright in a rare 1946 photograph of the old Camden craftsman.
Wright was 77 when the picture was made and he stands in bib overalls on some boathouse steps, a stout cane in his gnarled right hand acting as standing rigging. An old felt hat is jammed down low over his quizzically squinting eyes.
It's easy to imagine Alvirah taking it all in and muttering: ``You can't build 'em like I could, son. . . .'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Winkin', Blinkin' and Nod piloted this dreamboat for years before it
was pulled out of a sea of grass and weeds and hauled to the new
Museum of the Albemarle. Once restored, it will greet visitors to
the maritime museum and take them on their own fanciful journeys.
by CNB