Nine teams row skiffs
The Deltaville Maritime Museum’s (DMM) “Family Boatbuilding Week” was presented last week under the museum pavilion as nine families built John Wright style skiffs through the guidance of DMM volunteers.
The program was founded in 2002 by the late Steve “Kaptain Krunch” Smith and perpetuated and developed through the leadership of Chuck McGinnis and John England, who are program directors.
The program that takes five days to build a boat is one of just a few such boatbuilding programs in the country. The 14-foot, flat-bottom skiff is made of cypress and fir and held together with stainless steel fasteners. During Family Boatbuilding Week families work together on site daily with the help of volunteers to build the skiff.
“We see it as a life learning experience in several ways,” said England. “Participants learn how to use tools, build a boat, work together as a team and create memories.”
On Saturday, participants showed off their boats by competing in a rowing race on Mill Creek in front of the museum’s dock full of family members and interested onlookers.
John Wright
At the start of the deadrise and cross-planked wooden boatbuilding era in the 1890s, the Wright family of Deltaville were forerunners in that style of wooden boat construction. The Wrights were a key 20th century family in making Deltaville the wooden deadrise boatbuilding capital of the Chesapeake Bay.
In the last quarter of the 1800s, William Wright moved to Deltaville from Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. As happened so often over the generations the lure of Deltaville for Wright was tied to a woman. He would marry local girl Betty Hundley and they would have five boys.
The boys were Thomas Walker Wright, John Emerson Wright, George Landon Wright, Ladd Franklin Wright and Charles, who died as an infant. All of the adult boys went on to be boatbuilders and watermen. John was considered one of the best wooden boatbuilders on the bay. His boatyard was located on the banks of Jackson Creek where he built large wooden deck boats, deadrise commercial fishing boats, small recreational sailing skipjacks and skiffs.
Many a boy started his maritime life in a John Wright built wooden, flat-bottom skiff. The popularity and beauty of John Wright’s original skiffs is why the museum modeled their skiffs after John Wright, the master boatbuilder.
