Dory - History

History

With no clear definition of the type, and few early illustrations or detailed descriptions to go by, the early history of the dory is muddled at best. John Gardner identifies the first pictorial representation of a dory to a 1497 painting by Albrecht Dürer. The first known mention of a dory in detail was in 1719."Until about 1870, there are to be found no recorded dory lines, details, nor any list of particulars that would enable us to say with certainly what the earlier dories were really like." In its most popular form, the dory was created in New England fishing towns sometime after the early 18th century. Howard Chapelle writes, "... some kind of dory boat was in use on the Massachusetts coast as early as 1726." A definite precursor to the dory type was the early French bateau type, a flat bottom boat with straight sides used as early as 1671 on the Saint Lawrence River. The common coastal boat of the time was the wherry and the merging of designs between the wherry type and the simplified flat bottom construction of the bateau initiated the birth of the dory. Other antecdotal evidence exists of much older precursors throughout Europe. England, France, Belgium, and Italy all have small boats from the medieval periods that could reasonably be construed to be predecessors of the Dory.

Simeon Lowell in Amesbury Massachusetts is credited with building the first dories around 1793 which he referred to as 'wherries'. What this boat looked like is open to conjecture but from various references it can be inferred to have been a flat bottomed boat. While some assume that this boat followed the Banks dory shape, the Grand Banks cod fisheries for which the Banks dory was designed didn't start operating until the 1830s.

Simeon Lowell founded Lowell's Boat Shop in Amesbury Massachusetts in 1793. This is the birthplace of the Dory. Lowell's Boat Shop is now a non profit working museum still dedicated to building classic dories and skiffs. Simeon's grandson, Hiram Lowell developed the Banks Dory. The major innovation was the straight sides to the new Banks Dory. This made the boats stackable on top one another. This revolutionized the fishing industry because now fisherman would stack 10 Dories on a larger boat and use all 10 Dories at once in order to maximize yield

Dories were built all over New England from the Long Island Sound to the shores of Nova Scotia, with major production centers north of Boston, from Massachusetts to the New Hampshire border.