HISTORY
Built: 1889, Tilghman Island, MD by John B. Harrison
Length: 54 ft, 8 in (16.7 m)
Beam: 17 ft, 2 in (5.24 m)
“When they launched the Edna E. Lockwood on October 5, 1889 at Tilghman Island, half the people in town were there. Flags waved, people cheered, kids whistled and ran and shoved. [...]
The launching of a new bugeye was a big event in those days.
The life expectancy of a working ship on the Chesapeake is numbered at only twenty years or so. There are squalls which kick up suddenly, and ice, shipworms and rot, fire and neglect, and human error to bring an end to the career of most boats, however well built they are at the outset. It would have been beyond imagining, to those who watched, that this new bugeye, the
Edna E. Lockwood, would outlast them all, to be born again
and launched a second time, ninety years later.”
Edna E. Lockwood dredging for oysters, c. 1950. Photograph by Don Edwards. Collection of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, MD. Gift of Katherine Issa.
In 1889, at the age of 24, John B. Harrison of Tilghman Island, Maryland built Edna E. Lockwood, the seventh of 18 bugeyes he was to build. Harrison also built the well known log canoes Flying Cloud and Jay Dee.
Edna E. Lockwood was probably built on Chicken Point at the southeast end of Knapps Narrows. Her hull is hewn of nine pine logs, and is several inches wider on her starboard side. This asymmetry in her hull allows her to sail closer to the wind on port track, to dredge better on port track, and to come about to starboard more easily.
She was built with a sharp stern, but a platform known as a patent stern was added sometime around 1910 to provide more working space aft for handling the pushboat. With her centerboard up, Edna E. Lockwood draws only 2.7 feet, and her registered capacity is 9.83 tons net.
Built for Daniel W. Haddaway of Tilghman Island, a neighbor to John B. Harrison, Edna E. Lockwood dredged for oysters through the winter and carried freight, such as lumber, grain or produce, after the dredging season ended.
“Did farmers have grain to be taken to Baltimore for sale? The Lockwood would work up the shallowest creek at high tide, load at low tide, and hope the next high would float her free.
Lumber? Anything that could be put below, or piled on deck, would go. Sideboards would be erected to contain great piles of watermelons on the journey from farm to city. Tomatoes moved in the same way, in bushel baskets. Cattle and horses sometimes went by bugeye. Families moved too, with their belongings. The times were hard, the accommodations were primitive, but ships of the Lockwood’s type were the waterborne U-Haul of that day.”
She worked faithfully for various owners, mainly out of Cambridge, Maryland, until she stopped "drudging" for oysters in 1967. In 1973 she was donated to the Chesapeake bay Maritime Museum by John R. Kimberly.
1892 - Daniel Haddaway sold Edna to James A. Roe and Richard T. Richardson, of Tilghman Island, who fished the oyster beds for three years.
1896 - Roe and Richardson sold Edna to John F. Tall, of Madison, who sailed her out of Cambridge and worked the waters for 15 years.
1910 - Tall sold Edna to William Warfield. Captain Wingate operated the bugeye out Cambridge for more than 25 years.
1912 - Warfield sold to J. Hilleary Wingate. Wingate appears to have remained part owner or owner until his death.
1955 - Nettie Wingate sold Edna to William Jones of Cambridge.
1966 - Edna was purchased by John R. Kimberly in order to save her. She was taken to Captain Jim Richardson's shipyard on the Choptank River and cleaned up and repaired sufficiently to be sailed as a pleasure craft.
1973 - Edna E. Lockwood is donated to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum by John R. Kimberly with the understanding that she be preserved and displayed at the Museum for public education.
1994 - Edna E. Lockwood named a National Historic Landmark, representing the last historic bugeye still under sail.
2016 - The historic restoration of the log-hull of Edna E. Lockwood begins.
The Edna E. Lockwood underwent a restoration at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in 1975. Photo Credit: C. C. Harris
At the Museum, Edna was dismantled down to her nine logs in 1975 and rebuilt over the next several years. In this process, she was built stronger than the original, with the addition of 21 natural knees of hackmatack, new frames that extended all the way to her keel log instead of the wing log, a heavier kingplank, and more tie rods. Her oyster dredging gear, removed during the refit has not been replaced.
Edna E. Lockwood is a rare survivor, the last of the log-hull bugeyes afloat, and is without a doubt the most significant boat in the Museum's collection. In 1986, Edna was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. Despite extensive research, the origin of the boat's namesake still remains obscure.