On Sept. 10, the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum celebrated the 100 birthday of the 50-foot deck boat Elva C at the Reedville Classic Boat Show presented at the museum.
When looking at the pedigree of a wooden boat, there are a number of things that one might look at. Naturally, you look at the builder and the year the boat was built. When looking at the builder, it is not just the year he or she built the boat that is significant. The year the builder was born is significant too.
The Elva C was built in 1922, 100 years ago, by Gilbert White who was born in Mathews County in 1869 at the height of the Chesapeake Bay log canoe building era. Somewhere around 1900, White moved from Mathews County to Lancaster County and started building boats there. He was a pioneer in the development of today’s V-bow deadrise style boat built out of planks. This evolution of the deadrise and cross-planked bottom style of boat started on the Chesapeake Bay in the 1880s, about when White was of boatbuilding age.
Although the Elva C is built out of planks, signs of White’s log canoe boatbuilding heritage is all over the boat. The large top rim in the stern is made of “chunks” or logs which is a log canoe construction method that White and others brought to their plank built boats.
Longtime railwayman George M. Butler said the Elva C has one of the most unique and different methods of chunking (shaping the stern with short logs) that he has ever seen. The stern on the Elva C is more elliptical than round, a sign of an early built deck boat and of a log canoe builder.
Later, builders made sterns more perfectly round using electrical tools to smooth and round the surface. Gilbert White used a common chicken house hatchet to shape and smooth his sterns, said Dudley Biddlecomb, who visited White’s boat shop as a boy. “I know he didn’t have electricity at his shop in 1946 when my father had him build the Fred,” said Biddlecomb. The Fred was the name of the Biddlecomb family deadrise workboat.
In 1922 when the Elva C was built by White, he was 53 years old at the peak of his career and in the heyday of Chesapeake Bay deck boats. More deadrise-style deck boats, like the Elva C, were built in the 1920s then in any other decade. At the height, there were probably 2,000 deck boats on the bay. Today, there are about 40 left.
The Elva C’s very existence is a tribute to Gilbert White who built her right, to all previous owners who made the yearly trip with her to the railway to keep her fit and to the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum, which has shown the will to preserve an absolutely marvelous piece of Chesapeake Bay maritime history.
Elva C is listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register, National Park Service Register, National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmark register.
Happy birthday, Elva C.
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