In the Barnegat Bay Tradition Transcript
- ♪ If you're looking for fun ♪ ♪ Take your rod and your gun ♪ ♪ But leave all your troubles at home ♪ ♪ You'll have no time to fret ♪ ♪ Out on old Barnegat ♪ ♪ When the wind whips the waves into foam ♪ ♪ She will please and beguile ♪ ♪ Change your frown to a smile ♪ ♪ And chase all your cares away ♪
- Summer Headley represents one of the finest examples of a sportsman hunter in the United States. He guns in a traditional way using the Barnegat Bay decoys and a gunning boat known as a Sneakbox. The end is not exactly the means to Summers, it is the preparation and the excellence that he strives for in the quest for the waterfowl. You must remember when you consider Summers Headley, the deep tradition that he is involved with in his own experience in New Jersey with his father and probably before that. So that he's well versed in those artifacts, the Sneakbox, the Barnegat Bay decoy. So that from my mind, I don't know what Summers would say, but from my mind his decoys are memories of those hunts and memories of that tradition and that age as he continues to go out in these hunting enterprises. What's the difference between this bird, for example, and a Shourds goose?
- A Shourds is a thicker body, it's more of a rounder goose. This is flat bottom. This is a flat bottom bird and Shourds is rounder and deeper and different carving characteristics denoting the maker.
- Summers, do you figure this is a fairly typical jersey style bird?
- Oh, I think so. It's a beautiful bird made in the tradition of the Barnegat style. Hollow, light, easily carried. It's not really good for heavy weather but for a protected area it's very beautiful bird in the water. It looks nice, it looks like a goose.
- The Barnegat Bay Sneakbox and the Barnegat Bay decoy as I have considered them, should be thought of in terms of the same development in the same maritime community that produced them. Both of these artifacts are lightweight and strong, were noted for their strength. Both of these artifacts were designed in view of the Barnegat expanse.
- [Sam] A Sneakbox is a 12 foot boat, could be 14, 16, 18 foot or it could be 10 foot but it's built on the Sneakbox model. They're rounded on the bottom and they won't cut in the ice and you can sail 'em, you can row 'em and they're a very able boat, one of the ablest for the size it's ever known. The Sneakbox was designed for one purpose only and that is for to gun or to sneak up on ducks. It's the only boat it has a deck on it where you can put grass and stuff on it and float right in the ducks. It's a Sneakbox and it was originated right here.
- This is Mary Huffard of the American Folk Life Center interviewing Sam Hunt. How was it that you got started making Sneakboxes?
- Well, I lived with a man that was a gunner and in this town Waretown , it was all gunning and there was at one time probably 20 or 30 Sneakboxes here. And where they were built, I went to school only three miles, Barnegat. And I sat to school, when I got outta school I used to go down to the shop because I knew all the men that worked there, and of course when you're around and that you watch and you look and you take notice of how everything is put together.
- Sam's position in the tradition of Sneakbox making is a rather unusual one. He's found of telling of how people come from miles around just to talk with him and and to learn about his Sneakbox making. And that's because the local people themselves recognize that he's rather a unique individual who is not so unique that he falls outside of tradition, but in fact as a connoisseur of all the traditions around here, that he is very unusual.
- Before you start to build a boat, you must have a jig and that is the model. It can be a jig, it can be the model or a shape, any so-called strong timbered boat would be a jig no matter whether it's 10 foot or 40 feet would be a jig. The jig consists of the shape of the boat, what you're going to build. Then you start and spring your stringing pieces around what you string your timbers over. That's the way you form the shape of the boat. The furring strips are not part of the Sneakbox. After the timbers is strung and put over 'em, the furring strips has no more use at all. They are cut, sawed and taken out. This is a inside harpin. Now there's two these, but this one is mortised out so the timbers goes in it and the next one goes around and it's fastening through this what the planking goes in and they're all fastened together at the end. It's called the harpin, the main thing in any boat. Try again. How you go about bending the timbers, you have a steam box, a big steam box. And there's water in this pipe and this water is heated and the white oak timbers is already milled for the size that you want and they're put in the box. And when they get boiled and steamed enough so that you can bend them pliable and then you take 'em out and you bend them in the spot where they go. And the original Sneakboxes, they didn't steam no timbers, they use the sawed jersey cedar frame and they molded these frames out to a mold and then spliced them together in the center. They all had the crown that they wanted for the size shape. Each timber was marked from one to 14. They was all marked to the spot that they went because each one of them was maybe a different contour, but there was times when they sawed them all out to one contour. It all depended on the man who was building the boat. The stern of any boat is a transom. They are put in on different types and angles and different shapes. So it all depends on the boat that you're building. Tell you what, just before I make that cut, I've gotta make a trip here. I can't help it, this has to be done. But in these boats they're put in on about 13 or 14 degrees on an angle so that when there's any water in under it, it can't get above it. That goes in next to the harpin of course before the first plank goes on. I have a lot of different types of wood here, but mostly for boats it's cedar and oak. I mean I have red cedar, I have white oak, I have the jersey pine. Building boats you must have tools to cut any shape or a piece of wood that you're going to use or you can't build a the boat. You can't go to a lumberyard and buy a piece of wood to put in the boat. Very, very seldom because they don't have it big enough or the shape, you have to shape every piece of wood that's put into a boat. I have a planer, it's electric planer. I call it an equalizer because I can take a piece of wood six inches thick and I can bring it down to an eighth of an inch if I want to. But I can make it any size, any thickness, any width that I want. Then if I have to bevel it, then I have to do that by hand on the side. The next step is to plank the boat the way they're fitted or with a plane, you have to hand fit them and they have to be fitted into the time so that they're tight on the inside so there's what they call an airtight fit. There's that plank in the center and there's six planks goes on each side. There's 13 plank altogether but there's no law on that. You can put in 15, you could put in 17 or you could put in 20 if you wanted to. But if you get 'em too wide, you're apted to crack'em. So it's better to narrow 'em down and let the seams take the contour of the shape of the hall. This has to be divided. The water's going between the plank, there's very little will go through there if it gets damp it wouldn't go through there. But we use the corking cotton. You have to separate the cotton for the size of the seam but the seam must be opened up first and then the roller is tapered to fit into the seam. And then you must roll that in very evenly. And after that is put in, then the first thing you do is put a good linseed oil paint on it and it will never leak. Put it in even. That's all right. Look out now and look right out, hey. Now you got the boat planked. You turn the boat over and then you start and put in your mast steps, your centerboard trunks and you finish the top half of the boat. Every sailboat that sails must have a centerboard trunk into it. Actually it's about eight or 10 pieces of wood put together so that 10 or 12 inch board can go down through the center of it and it has to be tight on each end. Trunk has to be made and shaped to the angle and the width for where it's going to go. And then it has to be fitted into the hull exactly where it's going to go. Hit it down. The reason why you have to drive these in slow is it's copper, and if you drive a nail fast you can almost pick it out with your fingers but when you drive it slow, it'll hold three times as much. You couldn't get that out. The columns is the same as your timbers. The timbers in the bottom of the boat hold your plank and the columns hold your deck on the top of your boat and they are fastened into the inside harpin also the same as your timbers. They've come together one on one side of it and one on the other. This is a shelf for to put gun shells and anything that you wish on there. And these things this hull fastened to are called cod-wads and they are fastened to the deck columns. Then of course the deck goes on and then the oar locks on both sides. I am lining up an oar lock so that the bolts it goes through the top will go through the center of the column, which is under it, it fastens it to the boat. The oar locks is governed through an old Greek method, we'll say 14 inches from the front of your seat to the center of the oar lock. That's a standard rule. And from the front of that seat is 14 inches, is where the center of the oar lock wants to be. And the seat is up against the back end of the centerboard trunk, right where it belongs for you to row. Some people call it a spray curtain, but around here it is called a break water. It keeps the water out of the boat. When you're in a head sea or sailing, water runs off the deck and they don't run in the hull. Is a very necessity in the Sneakbox. You have to have one. It ain't a Sneakbox unless you got one of these on it. This is a decoy rack what holds the decoys or any other thing that you wish to put on but they must be removable. You have to unhook 'em, there's hooks comes on the side, you take the hooks out and you take the pieces. You can put 'em down inside the boat and you can cover the boat so you can't see 'em.
- What we have here is an example of the interplay between tradition and individual creativity. Folk artisans do not strive for anonymity as people often imagine, a folk artist must be anonymous. A ballad isn't a ballad unless we don't know who composed it. That's not true because people long to produce images of themselves. And a Sneakbox in a sense is a portrait of the Barnegat Bay man. ♪ Now have you ever been out on the bay ♪ ♪ As the morning uncovers the day ♪ ♪ And left in your mind magnificent signs ♪ ♪ And a feeling that faded away ♪ ♪ Now have you ever been out on the bay ♪ ♪ As the morning uncovers the day ♪ ♪ And left in your mind magnificent signs ♪ ♪ And a feeling that faded away ♪
- The European tradition of wild fowling is extremely ancient as you know, goes back to ancient Egypt to the wall paintings and to Roman Greece. Involves a taking of waterfowl with traps or seines or nets usually. By the 18th and 17th century in England and Europe, they were using things called decoy cages where the birds were trapped in these cages, being driven into the cages, or they would be captured by dogs when the birds were molting in the spring. But in America in the 19th century, a peculiar phenomenon developed, a wooden decoy. This is not to say there might not have been a wooden decoy here and there, but in a general use as a particular device to go after waterfowl, the wooden decoy was actually an American invention and an American tradition.
- The sporting gunner is a phenomena that occurred in the 19th century starting around the time of the Civil War. And it was with the increase in capital in terms of money and a lot of newly made rich individuals that people turn to recreation in the sense that we understand of going out and hunting for wild fowl. And in doing so, they would equip themselves with the finest of decoys, the best Abercrombie and Fitch apparel and shotguns imported from England. And they would head out to resorts such as those in the Barnegat Bay area, including the Tuckerton House, the Harvey House and the Sunset Hotel. Well the decoy as a historic artifact, is basically a social tool. It was used not as an implement to lure birds but as sort of a status statement as one went to a resort hotel and got the finest guides, the finest Sneakboxes, took the best equipment, that they would also get these birds that were made by the best carvers in the area. There was no real concern with the decoyer's art. It was rather on the carver's part the most number of decoys that he could turn out with the highest quality. On the part of the hunter, it was the the finest decoys that money could buy.
- I've been making decoys since I can remember really. My father died when I was 12 years old. I remember sitting watching him make decoys and I would carve a little along with him. That's really been all my life. I don't remember my grandfather but he made a lot of decoys. He lived up in Tuckerton and he gunned, he market hunted for a living, made decoys, pedaled fishing, I don't know how he did it all he did really, well the stories my aunt tells about him. But he must have really worked. And the decoys of his that are in collections today, he must have made a lot of decoys. There's a lot of stories about him making decoys. One is he'd go down and get a haircut in the barber chair and while he was down there he'd carve a head. By the time the barber was finished giving him a haircut, he was finished a head. And with the decoys that he made, he must have been every spare of minute of his time I guess was carving. The decoys I make are basically working decoys. They're decoys that could be used. Most of them today, people buy 'em for decoration, but they're really a working decoy. And then what I think a duck looks like, I don't copy off a real duck and none of the old timers did really. They hunted ducks, they saw ducks in the wild, they took the memory home with 'em. And you work from the memory and you come up with a nice decoy that you think is what it should look like. Today the carvers are getting real ducks. They're getting them frozen and they copy 'em feather for feather, really. It's really a model making instead of a carving. And it's a nice thing when it's done. It's a nice sculpture when it's finished. But I like art. You put a little dream into it, a little, your imagination. In fact, paintings, I think a painting if it's got a little somebody's thought into it, it's better than if a guy copies something. Or when I'm making 'em for my, or just making a decoy to sell, and when I put the head on I try to turn it to make it look that it suits me the best, which every one will be different, sideways or looking out. And I usually tilt it a little bit if it's looking sideways. If you ever notice ducks or looked at ducks in a park somewhere, you know, and they make a funny noise, they'll kind of cock their head sideways and look at you. And that's the way I get the head positions really. For a decoy to be a good working decoy, it does have to look like a duck. It has to float like a duck. It has to act like a duck really in the water, the way it bounces around, swims around. I think you gotta have enough roundness to it that it'll rock a little bit, not too much, and it's gotta swim back and forth. And it's gotta be weighted right so it sits the right depth in the water. And when a duck comes over, he sees that more than he would see the shape of the duck, you know, if it's realistic or not. He wants to see it at a distance of a hundred yards and looks down and say that's a nice flock of ducks down there, I'll go down and see what they're doing. I make a lot of decoys. But each decoy as it comes to be finished is an individual decoy. And I usually paint 'em one at a time so that I'm not painting the whole, you know, I'm not mass producing decoys in other words. I'm doing one at a time and each one is an individual piece of carving. I hate to copy somebody else, even if it's in my family. I do my own thing really. I make a duck the same way as my grandfather did, my father did. But as far as copying their style or carving or their patterns, I don't, I make my own duck. I think each one of them did 'cause you can tell 'em apart. You can tell my grandfather's duck, my father's duck. You can tell my duck.
- In the factory made decoy, we take the cedar or pine, form it out basically into the blocks of wood, the shape of the bird. The blocks are taken over to a multi-spindle carving machine set up in the carving machine. Dead center in the carving machine, there's a master. The body here is by Harry V. Shourds the first. The head here is by Harry V. Shourds the third, okay? He picked up the decoy off of Harry V. Shourds the third, he took it apart, set it up on centers. After it's put up on centers, it's set up this way so it'll fit into the machine. We do copies of Harry V. Shourds the third and we do the grandfather Harry V. Shourds again. Our copies are drastically different yet we do keep with the basic lines because it's part of Jersey history. We're proud of being able to do a copy, a fairly good copy of Harry Shourds without trying to rip off his name. The basic differences in ours are, again, you could start right off with the choice material. We use white pine a lot of times. Harry Shourds, as far as I know, always used white cedar. The head, see, if you look at a Shourds profile wise, from the neck right wrapped around the breast down to the bottom of the bird, looks almost like a real super free flow on the Shourds. Ours is more of a a slight angle in there. Same with from the throat to the breast of the bird. Now this is something that the novice eye wouldn't pick up, but they should be aware of it. Somebody comes in and say, I bought this Harry Shourds black duck for whatever, $200, and this and that, and it's ours. If they ask our opinion of it, we'll tell 'em. We'll tell 'em it's ours and to hell with whoever bought it off of us because they're out to rip off the public. We're proud of Harry Shourds name. We're not trying to make money off of it. We'll sell an honest, legit copy of the bird. But like I said, again, there's drastic differences.
- The rig I put out today, we generally gone up the head of Barnegat Bay or right on down to the bay to the inlet. Instead of just having the broad built stools and canvas backs for the diving ducks, we put out the full rig where we have the geese, the brant, the black ducks. Now they gotta be up wind. And the broad built stools are generally off a little bit further. Leave a little hole in the head of them and then drag the stools down wind. Each place was done different just like neighborhoods. People are different in each neighborhood and around Barnegat Bay, this is what they've done over hundreds of years. Now, Barnegat Bay stools are generally hollow. Maryland stools are generally solid. There's exceptions in all cases, but Barnegat Bay, they made the hollow stools because like the Sneakboxes you saw of mine today, people used to sail out with those Sneakboxes to go gunning and they had to get a lot of stools on it and they couldn't have the weight. The Barnegat and the Tuckerton area, there was a lot of guides that took parties out that would come down from the city. Now these people had to have decoys. So naturally, every interest he has to have somebody to supply. So there's a man like Harry Shourds who made thousands of decoys. His decoys, they shipped to Maryland and Virginia. You find lots of 'em down there today because they were commercial makers. They made 'em for the guides so the guides would have decoys. But these boys had pride in their work and that's why this was their hand and that's why you can tell their decoys. And you can tell one from the other, just the way the man worked. I don't go to the bay see if I can kill a water ducks or anything. I mostly go to bay to take my decoys and my Sneakbox 'cause that's just like going on a picnic to me. ♪ Sometimes you might see him towing ♪ ♪ His Sneakbox on Barnegat Bay ♪ ♪ After some black ducks he's going ♪ ♪ To eat on a cold winter's day ♪ ♪ It's a beautiful way ♪ ♪ On Barnegat Bay ♪ ♪ And it's a beautiful day out on Barnegat Bay ♪ ♪ Sometimes you might see him towing ♪ ♪ His Sneakbox on Barnegat Bay ♪ ♪ After some black duck he's going ♪ ♪ Eat on a cold winters day ♪ ♪ It's a beautiful way ♪ ♪ On Barnegat Bay ♪ ♪ And it's a beautiful day out on Barnegat Bay ♪
