Dickerson sailboats: one Chesapeake yard, four decades, three owners
Dickerson is the name of a single boatbuilding yard on Maryland's Eastern Shore, not a brand spread across builders. Bill Dickerson founded it in his own backyard on Church Creek near Cambridge, Maryland, in 1946, and it stayed a single operation - moving once, to La Trappe Creek in Trappe, Maryland - through three successive ownership groups until it closed in 1987. Across that run the yard's boats moved from wood to fiberglass, and its design credits moved from a pair of Bill Dickerson's retired-designer neighbors to a naval architect who had grown up sailing a Dickerson 35 as a boy. A buyer looking at a used Dickerson is looking at four decades of one Chesapeake yard's evolution, not a scattered catalog.
Origins and ownership
For the company's first twenty years, Bill Dickerson built pleasure boats ranging from compact day sailers to a 58-foot schooner. The line that established his reputation was the Simplissima, a hard-chined ketch in the Chesapeake bugeye tradition, descended from the Chesapeake Bay skipjack; he built four dozen of them in the 1950s, and the smaller 26-foot and 32-foot Simplissima-class boats became popular family cruisers on the strength of sturdy construction and reasonable cost. Individual boats varied even within a class - carpenters accommodated customer requests, and Bill Dickerson himself made impromptu changes on the shop floor - a working style that, by the early 1960s, had also earned him a reputation rugged enough to win a US Navy contract to build a series of patrol boats.
Bill Dickerson retired and sold the company - in 1967 by the owners association's account, in 1965 by Oxford Yacht Agency's - to Tom Lucke, an Eastern Shoreman, Naval Academy graduate, and Johns Hopkins-trained engineer, who moved the yard to its lasting home on La Trappe Creek in Trappe. In 1975, a Dickerson 41 owned by Neville Lewis set out on a four-year circumnavigation; blue-water sailor Ted Reed joined the boat from Puerto Rico to Tahiti and was impressed enough to want one of his own. In 1978, Reed, his wife, and Annapolis businessman Buddy Somerville bought Dickerson Boatbuilders and the adjacent Chesapeake Marine Industries outright, opening the yard's final ownership era. By the mid-1980s, Dennis Blaeuer, described as bringing a Swiss sense of business discipline to the yard, had become its majority owner - just as a 1984 slowdown, a strong dollar favoring European imports, and heavy spending on dredging and new piers pushed the company into hard times. Dickerson Boatbuilders closed in 1987; when Oxford Yacht Agency became associated with the site in 1993 as Dickerson Harbor, more than 300 boats had been built there over the yard's life.
The designers
Bill Dickerson's early boats came from an informal arrangement rather than a hired design office: Ted Graves, a retired Boston naval architect, and Ernie Tucker, a retired designer, both lived near Dickerson at Church Creek and ended up drawing the boats, while Howard Chapelle - who wrote a widely cited book on boatbuilding and curated the Smithsonian's watercraft collection - "did the kibitzing," according to part-owner Don Griffin's account. Tucker's role deepened under Tom Lucke, who employed him, by then a noted naval architect based in Oxford, to re-engineer the hard-chine 35 into a round-bilge, long-distance cruiser. Ted Reed brought in a third designer, George Hazen, who as a young man had spent summers cruising the Chesapeake on his father's Dickerson 35 before becoming a naval architect described as "intimately familiar with Dickerson." Hazen upscaled the 36 into a new high-performance cruiser that became the 37, and a separate 37-foot racing sloop came from Bruce Farr, launched in the early 1980s - accounts differ by two years, giving either 1981 or 1983 - and now generally distinguished as the Dickerson 37 (Farr) to separate it from Hazen's cruising design.
Construction through the eras
Dickerson built in wood through the 1960s: strip-plank mahogany 35-foot ketches and the Dickerson 40, both continued by Lucke after he took over. Lucke judged that fiberglass had by then proven itself as a strong, reliable boatbuilding material, and the yard began replacing wood hulls with fiberglass; Lippincott Boatworks, in Riverton, New Jersey, molded the early Dickerson fiberglass hulls. In 1974 the wooden 40 gave way to a new 41-foot fiberglass ketch, and the 36 also began production in fiberglass that same year. On the later Hazen-designed 37, the yard's traditional full keel gave way to a moderate fin keel and skeg-hung rudder - reducing wetted surface and improving maneuverability while keeping the boat's tracking ability - and the hull and deck were built of end-grain balsa-cored fiberglass. Under Dennis Blaeuer, the yard began assembling cabinetry sections outside the boat and fitting them in as complete units, following the same move away from building everything stick-by-stick inside the hull that Hinckley and Alden had already made.
Lines and generations
The through-line is the Dickerson 35: introduced as a hard-chined, aft-cockpit ketch, it became the basis for the yard's evolutionary designs through the 1960s and 70s, including a center-cockpit, round-bilge version that gave cruising families a second sleeping cabin, and it eventually became the Dickerson 36, distinguished by a modified clipper bow. The wood-era 40 and its fiberglass successor, the 41, both trace to that same 35. George Hazen's cruising 37 launched in 1981 after three years of development, and the yard's largest boat, the 50, followed in the early 1980s - 1982 by the owners association's and Ferenc Mate's account, 1980 by Oxford's - presented at the Newport International Sailboat Show. Bruce Farr's unrelated 37-foot racing sloop rounded out the lineup, aimed at owners who wanted to race rather than cruise.
Who Dickerson is for
Ferenc Mate, writing in The World's Best Sailboats, credited the yard with drawing a following on the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound that he ranked second only to "the zealots of Henry Hinckley." A buyer drawn to the name is buying into a single Chesapeake yard's full run - from a backyard keel poured beside a vegetable garden to a fiberglass cruiser designed by a naval architect who had grown up sailing the boats himself.
