Before the Word “Waterman”
Long before Somerset County existed, Indigenous communities lived within a waterscape already mapped by experience. The Annemessex people lived in the region of present-day Crisfield and were closely connected with the Pocomoke and Nanticoke. Rivers and tidal creeks were roads as well as food sources. Fish were taken with nets, weirs, spears, and hooks; shellfish were gathered from the shallows; and dugout canoes carried people, food, tools, and news.
This was not a primitive preface to a later maritime history. It was the first long chapter of that history. Seasonal movement, knowledge of spawning fish, careful use of marsh and forest resources, and an intimate understanding of tide and weather all predated European settlement. In a 2023 Maryland State Archives oral history, Crisfield resident Philip Goldsborough of the Pocomoke Indian Nation described land and water as central to his culture and emphasized the need to protect the Pocomoke and Annemessex Rivers so that hunting and fishing traditions can continue.
For the Table and for Market
After English settlement, nearly every household near navigable water used the rivers, sounds, and marshes in some way. Families caught fish, trapped turtles and muskrats, gathered oysters, set nets, hunted waterfowl, and caught crabs for their own tables. A small skiff could supply food when cash was scarce. What was not eaten fresh might be salted, smoked, dried, or shared with neighbors.
The same catch could move between household use and commerce. A man might bring home part of a day's catch and sell the remainder at a landing, store, packing house, or railroad depot. Women and children cleaned fish, picked crabs, tended peelers, mended gear, kept accounts, prepared food for crews, and managed homes while boats were away. The work cannot be understood by looking only at the men listed as “waterman” in a census.
The Oyster Century
During the nineteenth century, oysters changed Somerset's waterfront economy. Northern demand, improved canning, rail transportation, and the abundance of Chesapeake oyster beds turned a local food into a large commercial product. Crisfield grew into one of the nation's best-known seafood towns. Buyboats, schooners, pungies, canoes, and later skipjacks brought oysters to wharves where shuckers opened them for fresh shipment or packing.
The boom brought opportunity and conflict. Tongers worked from small boats in shallower water. Dredge boats could cover larger beds, and disputes over gear, licenses, boundaries, and access became part of the oyster wars. Laws attempted to regulate seasons and protect Maryland beds, while enforcement vessels and watermen sometimes played dangerous games of pursuit.
Somerset became especially identified with the skipjack, the broad, shallow-draft sailing vessel developed for oyster dredging. The surviving skipjacks Ida May, H. M. Krentz, and Claud W. Somers preserve different parts of that story. They also remind us that a working boat was never merely picturesque. Its value lay in what its captain and crew could make it do in cold weather, thin water, and a changeable wind.
Boats Made for the Work
Somerset watermen used boats suited to particular places and jobs: log canoes and skiffs for creeks and marsh edges, sharp-stern and round-stern workboats for crabbing and tonging, deadrises for hauling gear and catch, buyboats for carrying seafood, and skipjacks for dredging oysters under sail. Shallow draft mattered in Tangier and Pocomoke Sounds and in the Big and Little Annemessex, Manokin, and Wicomico Rivers, where a few inches of water could determine whether a boat passed safely or grounded.
Boatbuilding was part of the same knowledge system. Builders adjusted hull shape, beam, freeboard, and power to local conditions. Repairs were often made at home or in small yards. A waterman who could splice a line, patch a net, sharpen tongs, repair a pot, and coax an engine back to life lost fewer working days.
Following the Seasons
There was no single waterman's year. Spring might bring shad and herring into the rivers, soft crabs into shedding floats, and the first heavy work on crab pots. Summer meant crabbing, fishing, clamming, and long days in packing houses. Fall brought cooler-water fisheries and preparation for oyster season. Winter oystering could be the most punishing work of all: dark departures, wet decks, frozen lines, raw wind, and heavy gear.
Families shifted with the resource. Some watermen crabbed in warm weather and oystered in winter. Others combined fishing with farming, carpentry, boatbuilding, ferry work, hunting, or seasonal labor. On Smith Island and Deal Island, the boundary between home and workplace was especially thin. Boats lay at the door, crabs shed in nearby floats, and conversations about tide, wind, prices, and catches moved through kitchens, stores, churches, and wharves.
The Family Business
Water work was family work. Oral histories from Smith Island and Deal Island describe knowledge moving across generations: where to set pots, when a wind would turn, how to approach a shoal, how to grade crabs, and which channel still carried water at low tide. Frank and Deanna Horner's memories, along with interviews with Jack Willing and Ted Daniels in the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum's folklife collection, help preserve the household side of a life that official records often reduce to an occupation and an income.
Women were essential to the seafood economy. They picked crabmeat, shucked oysters, operated shedding businesses, kept books, baited and repaired gear, and sold the catch. In 1938, hundreds of predominantly Black women crab pickers in Crisfield struck for higher wages. Their action belongs within watermen's history because the commercial fishery did not end when a boat reached the dock. Processing labor turned the catch into a saleable product.
Learning the Water
For many Somerset boys, learning the water was part of growing up. A child began close to shore: handling a skiff, sculling, setting a hand line, dipping crabs, trapping turtles—often called “turkling”—or helping an older relative. Gradually, the map widened. Boys learned every gut, creek, cove, marsh point, bar, and cut, not as lines on paper, but as places known by depth, bottom, tide, wind, and memory.
That knowledge was practical and exact. A boy learned how much weather a small boat could stand, where a squall first showed itself, which landmarks lined up with a channel, and what a change in the feel or color of the water meant. He learned that courage was not the same thing as carelessness. By the time many young men were old enough to appear in a census as watermen, they had already served a long apprenticeship.
Capt. Art Daniels Jr., who began working on the water as a boy and became one of the Chesapeake's best-known skipjack captains, represents that continuity. Oral histories preserve not only his knowledge of crabbing, oystering, and storms, but also the humor, stories, and language through which watermen taught one another.
Danger, Law, and Storms
The same water that provided a living could take one. Drownings, sudden gales, ice, fog, fire, machinery, collisions, and boats overloaded with catch appear throughout Lower Shore newspapers and family histories. A loss could remove several members of one family at once and leave a household without its principal income.
On March 4, 1977, Capt. Thompson Wallace left Deal Island aboard the skipjack Claud W. Somers with a crew composed largely of relatives. A gale struck, the vessel sank, and the captain and six crewmen were lost. Wallace was one of the Chesapeake's few Black skipjack captains. The tragedy belongs both to Somerset's maritime history and to the history of Black skill, ambition, and family enterprise on the Bay.
Regulation was another constant. Licenses, closed seasons, gear restrictions, oyster boundaries, cull laws, and catch limits changed over time. Watermen sometimes resisted rules they believed ignored local conditions, while conservation officials argued that regulation was necessary to preserve the resource. That tension—between lived knowledge, science, law, and the need to earn a living—remains part of Chesapeake life.
Black Watermen in the Record
Black Somerset residents worked in every part of the seafood economy: as captains, tongers, dredgers, crabbers, fishermen, boatmen, shuckers, pickers, packers, and laborers. Yet their work is often harder to follow. Census takers used broad occupational terms; newspapers did not report every crew equally; and ownership records tell more about boats than about the men who worked aboard them.
Researchers can recover more by reading records together. Census schedules, death certificates, marriage records, city directories, boat documentation, newspapers, oral histories, and cemetery records may turn a generic “laborer” into a tonger, captain, or crabber. Capt. Wallace's story is especially important, but it should not stand alone. It points toward many other lives waiting to be reconstructed.
What Changed, and What Did Not
Engines replaced sail for most work. Refrigeration, trucks, and highways changed the route from dock to market. Oyster disease, declining stocks, pollution, shoreline loss, sea-level rise, changing salinity, regulation, imported seafood, and rising costs altered the business. Aquaculture and heritage tourism created new paths, while fewer children entered the trade full-time.
Yet the older pattern is still visible. A Somerset waterman succeeds by noticing: water temperature, moon and tide, wind, bottom, grass, bait, the condition of a crab, and the behavior of birds and fish. The tools change more quickly than the habit of close attention.
Grant Corbin of Deal Island, a third-generation waterman whose crabbing was memorably described in William W. Warner's Beautiful Swimmers, often spoke from that long observation. His life and the work of Capt. Art Daniels, the Horner family, Jack Willing, Ted Daniels, and many unnamed neighbors show why “waterman” means more than a job title. It names a relationship among family, community, work, and place.
Sources and Further Reading
- National Park Service, “Life in the Indigenous Chesapeake.”
- Maryland State Archives, MAYIS Indigenous Records Oral Histories, including Philip Goldsborough and Sam Doughty.
- John R. Wennersten, The Almighty Oyster: A Saga of Old Somerset and the Eastern Shore, 1850–1920.
- Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Folklife Collection finding aid.
- Maryland Sea Grant, Chesapeake Quarterly, oral histories and articles on working watermen.
- William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay.
- Maryland Historical Trust and Maryland State Archives material concerning the 1938 Crisfield crab pickers' strike.
- Janie Meneely, “Good Men Down,” on Capt. Thompson Wallace and the Claud W. Somers.
- Edward H. Nabb Research Center for Delmarva History and Culture, Enduring Connections project and Lower Shore records.