The death of David C. Holly, 83, last month in Annapolis, was the second within a year of a prominent Chesapeake Bay steamboat historian.
Last May, H. Graham Wood, 87, co-author of "Steamboats Out of Baltimore," published by Tidewater in 1968, died at his Roland Park home.
Written with Robert H. Burgess, the book has become one of the standard works for anyone interested in the era when white packet boats, with their single straight black funnels belching the aroma of soft coal smoke, plied the bay, stitching together via a waterborne highway the entire Delmarva region.
The sound of their melodious steam whistles heralded their arrival or departure for such far-off and bustling ports of call as Old Point Comfort and Norfolk. Or, sometimes, less glamorous but equally as important (in terms of freight and passenger revenues) destinations such as Abell's Landing, the Galesville Wharf on the West River or Porto Bello on the St. Mary's River.
Both Holly and Wood kept alive 1989 PHOTO David C. Holly in words and pictures a period of bay transport history that flourished from 1815 until 1962, and since has vanished without a trace.
On the surface it would seem that the authors were competitors. But they were friendly rivals, for there was plenty of material to go around and they were linked together by their shared affection for Chesapeake Bay steamboats.
Wood took his first steamboat trip in 1914, and recalled in a 1991 Evening Sun interview looking over the boat's rail and "seeing nothing but sea nettles."
He then spent much of his youth aboard steamboats accompanying his father, an official of a lumber company, on buying trips up and down the bay and into its remotest corners and rivers.
Of the experience, Wood said in the interview, "There was nothing quite like it. Waiting on a country wharf for what seemed like hours before sighting the smoke and then the steamer's stack over the willow trees."
At his death last year, co-author Burgess described Wood's love of bay steamers as something "he was obsessed with. It was something that he had grown up with."
Like Wood, it was as a child that Holly fell under the spell of the steamboats, whose straight bows once shadowed the Pratt and Light street wharves, their arrival and departure accounting for much of the city's downtown waterfront activity in those years.
