Boater crafts shingle-carrying vessel

Lighter shingle boats disappeared 150 years ago

By Toby Tate
Staff Writer

Saturday, November 07, 2009
CAMDEN — 

Building a type of boat that no one has seen for 150 years isn’t easy. But with the aid of photographs from a magazine and a little help from his friends, George Ramsey managed to build one in five months.

Ramsey, a retired Coast Guard warrant officer and avid boater, constructed what was once known as a “lighter shingle boat.”

The boats were built from the mid-1600s through the Civil War and were used to bring wood shingles, siding and wood products out of the Great Dismal Swamp via shallow ditches. The shingles and siding were made from Atlantic white cedar, which was cut from juniper trees growing in the swamp.

Ramsey started the project in February as a way to help people understand some of the history of the Great Dismal Swamp, where the boats were once widely used.

“This one that I’ve made is probably the first one that’s been even attempted to show to the public since the 1860s,” Ramsey said. “This is really an attempt to sort of keep the history alive. There’s a 150 years of history that ought not to be shoved aside.”

Except for not having wheels, the boat looks a lot like a covered wagon, Ramsey said.

“In fact, if you put wheels on this thing, you wouldn’t hardly be able to tell the difference,” he said.

The only references Ramsey had to help build the boat were photos published in Harper’s Monthly in 1856. The photos in fact are the only surviving visual evidence the boats ever existed.

The boats, which were used by various lumber companies, including one owned by George Washington, floated lumber via ditches to deep-water ports where ships could distribute the timber products to different ports around the world.

The timber companies hired both freed slaves and free indentured servants, Ramsey said, to cut the wood and work the lighters.

“They would go back in the woods for a week at a time,” he said. “They would load this week’s work in these lighters, then they would walk back down the ditch pushing this load of shingles back to deep water.”

Ramsey said the men were paid according to the number of shingles they had cut during the week.

Twice, the boats were all but erased from existence, Ramsey said. The first came during the Revolutionary War, the second during the Civil War.

On the second occasion, Union Army General Edward Wild, who was known as the “Wild Man of the Swamp,” ordered all floating material in the swamp to be destroyed, Ramsey said.

“It was to keep the guerillas from making their sneak attacks on the northern army,” he said.

The lighters’ usefulness eventually ended, however, once the railroads started laying tracks through the swamp, Ramsey said.

“They just got (the shingles out of the swamp) a different way,” he said.

Ramsey said he and some friends built the lighter in a Camden County garage over the course of five months. The boat is about 16 feet long and is as close to authentic as possible. It’s made of the white cedar that grows in the swamp.

J.W. Jones Lumber in South Mills, one of the few lumber companies that still handle white cedar, donated the lumber for the project, Ramsey said.

“It’s timber that was harvested out of the swamp after Hurricane Isabel destroyed thousands of acres of this juniper,” he said.

The boat won’t be ready for display until after the first of the year, Ramsey said. It will be part of several displays set up by Ramsey and Tim Aydlett, both of whom are members of Friends of the Dismal Swamp, a local advocacy group founded by Aydlett’s wife, Michele.

Aydlett said volunteers will man the displays in the swamp and help to explain the history behind them.

“What we want to do is a special activity day on Sunday afternoons after (the park) opens and people can walk to these different places and get information,” he said. “That’s the plan anyway. It’s a golden opportunity for this part of the state.”