A Bronze of Shore heritage

Workboat at Bay Creek’s entrance fitting landmark

As seen in Eastern Shore News – 01-11-2006

By Ceri Larson Danes

CAPE CHARLES — Bay Creek developer Dickie Foster referred this week to his latest addition of local historic preservation with folksy understatement.

"It’s a nice chunk of bronze," he said.

Tipping the scales at a little over 4,000 pounds, those were his words to describe the just-installed life-size replica of a waterman, his son, dog and crab pot aboard a quintessential Eastern Shore scow. Every detail, from the dents in the gas can to the crab reaching for the curious nose of the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, evokes something good and positive for everyone who stops to take in the new attraction at Bay Creek’s main entrance.

Nearly everyone, anyway. Foster said he’d just received a fax from someone who said, "if you don’t make an overlook, I’m going to have my car rear-ended because I keep stopping to look." Those sorts of comments are all right with Foster. It means he has accomplished what he set out to do.

Back in the summer of 2003, Foster said in conversations with local artist Thelma Peterson and some other friends here that he wanted to come up with an identifying image for the Shore. "If ya’ll could identify something and tell someone, "When you see this, you know you are on Virginia’s Eastern Shore," he asked, "what would it be?" It had to be something you don’t see anywhere else, and the high-level bridge on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel wouldn't count.

Foster said he’d always identified the deadrise boats with the Shore, but it wasn’t quite right because they also can be found in Maryland, so are not unique to this area. He was prepared to do it though, when Peterson called him up with the idea of the Chincoteague Scow. Foster fell for it immediately. It’s steeped in Shore history: just what he wanted.

The boat used as a model for the sculpture is a Hancock Scow, a classic Eastern Shore design of the Hancock boat-building family from Chincoteague. The family has built boats on the Shore for more than 200 years.

The first step for Peterson was to snap endless photographs as she drove her own boat beside Dennis Lattimer of Townsend in his boat, with his son Hunter, and their retriever, Colonel (owned by Wayne Heath of Townsend), crabbing in the waters offshore. She consulted with Foster and he made some changes. In order to be historically accurate, for example, he changed the Honda engine to an Evinrude and removed the state license registration.

Peterson then created drawings and paintings from the photograph, The boat used for the model by the sculptor, Ken Herlihy of Galena, Md., is a 16-foot Hancock Scow now in the collection of the Maritime Museum in St. Michael’s Md. Foster said Peterson put the project out for bid to sculptors who are well-recognized for work in marine-oriented subjects. The bidding process reached from Pennsylvania to Florida. "We went looking for who we thought would be the best people in the country to do that," he said, "and we think we got the best."

Herlihy worked with Laran Bronze, a Philadelphia, Pa. foundry. The process from Peterson’s design to installation was about 18 months. On a Saturday morning two weeks before Christmas the finished product arrived and was set in a pond with no water. Since then, Foster has added plenty of water and detail, from a bubbler under the motor and irrigation nozzles to create the sense of moving water; to indigenous vegetation along the shoreline. Still to be added: an osprey, a channel marker and some form of lighting to create an appropriate night effect.

"A lot of people did a lot to get it looking right with all the details," Foster said. And he’s pleased with the reception. Lots of people have praised him for the work, and for his part Foster said he’d like to take credit but he’s not the artist. He said it has caused some traffic problems with people stopping to look, and plenty have seen it, including a lot of watermen.

Some of the best comments to history-buff-developer Foster are when people say it reminds them of when they were 17 years old. "It’s the Eastern Shore I was hoping to capture," he said. To Foster, there’s more to it than just seeing a wonderful work of art. "To be able to tell the story to people who wouldn’t know a Chincoteague Scow from a John Smith Scow…once you know the story it really comes to life."

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