On the last Saturday of October, the waterfront at the foot of Fernando Street fills with boats that were never meant to be fast, cheap, or easy. They are wooden, most of them, and many of them are older than the people who restored them. The Manteo Wooden Boat Show takes over George Washington Creef Park and the docks around the Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse for a single day, and the point of it is not spectacle so much as inspection: visitors are invited to lean in, run a hand along a rail, and look closely at joinery that took months to get right.
The show is open to any wooden boat, newly built or lovingly brought back, and exhibitors are judged in two broad classes, owner-built or owner-restored and professionally built or professionally restored. Spectators get a vote too, through the People's Choice Award. The top honor, handed out at an evening dinner after the boats come off display, is the H.A. Creef Award, a perpetual prize given to the best overall boat in the fleet.
The name on that award is the reason the show exists where it does. George Washington Creef was a Roanoke Island boatbuilder associated with the shad boat, the traditional workboat built on the island beginning in the late 1870s. The boats were named for the shad fishery they served, and they were built round-bottomed with a single mast and a sprit sail, sometimes carrying a jib and topsail as well.
For half a century, Roanoke Island was the center of shad boat construction. The large majority of the boatyards that turned them out sat on the island or within twenty miles of its shores. In the early 1900s the design shifted to a gasoline engine, and builders converted older sailboats by pulling out the centerboard and well, adding battens to deepen the hull, and boring a shaft alley. In 1987 the North Carolina General Assembly made the shad boat the official state boat.
Only a handful of original shad boats survive. One of them is the Ella View, built by Creef in 1883, and it is featured at the Roanoke Island Maritime Museum, which occupies the boathouse that bears Creef's name. The museum is a working boat shop as much as an exhibit hall, with restoration projects underway and traditional-skills workshops running alongside the displays, and the show is essentially its annual open house turned inside out, with the collection spilling from the boathouse into the park and onto the water.
The setting does a lot of the work. The Roanoke Marshes Lighthouse that the boats cluster around is a reconstruction, dedicated in 2004, of a square cottage-style screw-pile light that was first lit in 1877 at the southern entrance to Croatan Sound, near Wanchese. The original marked the channel with a fourth-order Fresnel lens and a fixed white light with a red sector until it was decommissioned in 1955; when a private party tried to move the structure, the house was lost in the sound. The replica on Shallowbag Bay carries a fourth-order Fresnel lens of its own and houses historical exhibits. At the foot of its pier stands the Manteo Weather Tower, an old U.S. Weather Bureau coastal warning display tower that once flew signal flags to warn mariners of wind shifts and approaching storms.
Admission to the show is free, and the display runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., though exhibitors must register in advance. Parking is available on the street and in seven public lots within easy walking distance of downtown. The timing puts the show at the tail end of the Outer Banks season, when the crowds have thinned and the weather is more likely to cooperate with a day spent outdoors, and it lands in the middle of Manteo's fall calendar, alongside other downtown events that weekend.
What draws people back, though, is the narrowness of the thing. This is not a general maritime festival with something for everyone. It is a boat show for people who care how a plank is fastened, staged in a town that spent decades building the boats in question, at a museum that still keeps a working shop. The boats on the grass and the boats in the water are the same argument, made twice: that a wooden hull, properly kept, outlasts the person who built it, and that the knowledge of how to keep it is worth passing on.