Shad boat

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In 1987, the North Carolina General Assembly proclaimed the shad boat the Official State Historic Boat. One hundred years earlier George Washington Creef of Roanoke Island built the first shad boat in North Carolina in the early 1880s. Creef shaped his boat hull from the root ball of Atlantic white cedar, also known as juniper, trees that grew along the shoreline of the pocosin wetland region of southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. Initially the shad boat had a round-bottomed hull and single mast rigged with a sprit sail. Later, in the early 1900s, the hull shape was altered into a hard chine "v" bottom to support an engine block. Once the pickup truck of eastern North Carolina, there are only a handful of relic shad boats left on Roanoke Island. One is on view at the George Washington Creef Boathouse in Manteo, where the curator, Scott Whitesides and volunteers recently replicated the Creef shad boat.