Fannie Insley

Narrative History

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The schooner Fannie Insley was built in 1883 by Joseph W. Brooks. Madison, Maryland, is carried here as the primary building location, while several selected records identify Church Creek, Maryland. Both places belong to the same Dorchester County shipbuilding landscape, but the differing location statements should be preserved rather than forced into a single wording. The vessel is recorded as official number 120565, 59 gross tons, 56 net tons, 78 feet long, 23.2 feet in beam, and 6 feet in depth.¹

By the late 1880s, Fannie Insley was already appearing in long-distance coastal and island trade. In April 1888 she sailed from Baltimore for Eleuthera to load pineapples, and in June 1888 she was spoken off Hatteras while again bound from Baltimore to Eleuthera under Captain Clayton. A later 1890 notice placed her arriving from Eleuthera with cargo. These entries show the schooner working beyond purely local Chesapeake service, using Baltimore as a base for trade that reached the Bahamas.²

The early twentieth-century record shows a working schooner moving through freight, oyster, and repair episodes under several masters and owners. In 1902, Captain Luther Phillips was aboard when Fannie Insley was struck by a bugeye in the Honga River during an incident that later appeared in a criminal trial. In 1905, Captain Phillips reported a navigation hazard at the Lazaretto light. In 1906 the vessel, then described as a 59-ton bay schooner built at Church Creek in 1883, was sold by Capt. Luther T. Phillips to John L. Farenholt and others of Freeport, Virginia, for continued general freighting; later that year, under Captain Coates, she collided with the schooner Cecilia off Poplar Island and went into repair while discharging lumber.³

The same pattern continued in scattered but useful notices. In 1907 Beacham installed a new mainmast for the coming oyster season. In 1908, under Captain Eugene Mills, Fannie Insley was recorded at George Woolford's wharf with coal. In 1909 she was loading in the Eastern Branch, and by 1912 she had changed hands again, from Luther Phillips of Salisbury to Davis Price. In 1918 a Custom House notice recorded the sale of the schooner, named there as Fannie B. Insley, from William D. Price to Alonzo H. Moore for $4,000.⁴

Photographs and later port notices place Fannie Insley firmly in the working waterfront world of the Chesapeake. She was photographed docked in the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal about 1906, at the C&D Canal lock at Chesapeake City with oyster-shell deckloads, under sail on the Patapsco River in 1933, stern-docked at Smith's Shipyard on Curtis Creek in 1935, and at Baltimore wharves in the later 1930s. A 1933 arrival notice names Evans as master and wheat as cargo, while later sale notices in 1938 and 1939 offered a handy, able schooner from BLW's Boat Yard in Georgetown, Maryland, and from Baltimore-area contacts.⁵

The Evans family records give the vessel a personal frame as well as a commercial one. Images associated with Calvert Evans include bow and deck views under sail, and an oral-history transcript records Capt. C. Calvert Evans saying that he went to sea with his father on Fannie Insley before later working other Chesapeake vessels. A 1926 item also connects Captain Raymond Evans with the vessel through an accident involving its gasoline hoisting apparatus. These sources place the schooner in the remembered labor of a Chesapeake maritime family.⁶

In the late 1930s and 1940, Fannie Insley came under Captain D'Arcy Grant, who bought the aging schooner in Baltimore and worked her as a sailing freighter. Reports describe lumber and oyster-shell cargoes, hard voyages, a five-day shipwreck, and a 45-day ice lock. In August 1940, while carrying oyster shells for fertilizer, she was lost off Tangier Island or Windmill Point after heavy weather damaged her rig and opened her seams. Captain Wilbur "Bunk" Willey and the other hands escaped, but the uninsured vessel was a total loss.⁷

Read together, the selected evidence shows Fannie Insley as a Brooks-built Dorchester schooner with a long and varied working life: Eleuthera fruit voyages, Chesapeake freight, oyster-related work, lumber, wheat, coal, wharf and canal scenes, repairs, ownership changes, and a final dramatic loss in 1940. The record is still fragmentary, but it is no longer only a visual record or a casualty story. It is a many-decades working record of a Chesapeake cargo schooner.

Timeline

Timeline content may be truncated, fragmentary, or incomplete, and may require further evaluation.