Pound Net Fishery at Parkers Creek
Watermen from the Eastern Shore established a fishing camp at the mouth of Parkers Creek in the early 20th century and fished with pound nets in the waters nearby. Two of these watermen, Jesse Richardson and Ezekiel Corkran, from Oxford, Maryland, had begun fishing pound nets in Calvert County waters by 1917. They purchased the bayfront parcel at Parkers Creek in 1922 but may have used the site earlier. Richardson's son Frank and his fishing crew later occupied the camp. Their fishing crews included watermen from Oxford and local African American men, including members of the Commodore family. Frank Richardson and his crew continued to fish a series of pound nets from Parkers Creek to Flag Ponds until 1958.
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Capt. Frank Richardson, right, and his Parkers Creek fishing crew hauling in a pound net, looking west with the Calvert County shoreline in the background. A. Aubrey Bodine made the photograph between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s. Crew members often included African American men from the Parkers Creek area. Family members consulted in 2024 tentatively identified the men as the brothers Johnny and Willis Commodore, and Louis Waul. Meanwhile, former crew member Bill Tettimer said he thought one of the men might be George Boots. (From the collections of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, Baltimore, B-1422.)
Background: the Chesapeake Pound Net Fishery
A pound net is a nearshore stationary live-entrapment setup that harvests a variety of finfish. This form of trap net has been used along the Atlantic coast since the mid-19th century. Introduced to Chesapeake Bay waters in 1858, the fishery became more common after 1870.
Pound net diagram. (Coit M. Coker, Maryland's Commercial Fishing Gear 1: The Fin-fish Gears, Department of Research and Education, Education Series No. 18, 1949: 8)
In a pound net, a configuration of nets is strung between poles set in the bay bottom. A long leader running perpendicular to the shoreline intercepts the fish and directs them into enclosures called hearts that funnel them into the pound head. The rectangular pound head has a net floor and entraps the catch until it is removed. In the Chesapeake, pound nets are generally placed at a depth of at least 12 feet.
Pound nets are set, maintained, and fished by a captain and crew using a workboat and skiffs called fishlighters. When fishing, they approach the net at slack tide and loosen it enough to allow their boat to enter the pound. The funnel is then drawn up to prevent the catch from escaping. Working from one side, the crew haul up the net to concentrate the fish. As the pound head is reduced in size and the fish are concentrated, the fishermen use dipnets to remove the catch. Fish are sorted, landed ashore, and preserved or transported to market.
Parkers Creek Fishery: the People
Capt. Jesse Franklin "Buck" Richardson (1881-1970) and Capt. Ezekiel "Zeke" Corkran (1878-1951) were not just business partners, they were related by marriage. Corkran's wife, Martha R. Richardson Corkran (1878-1961), was Capt. Buck's older sister. Buck Richardson's wife, Lillie May Cottingham Richardson (1882-1967) was Zeke Corkran's niece. One important crew member was Buck Richardson's grandnephew, William Andrew "Bill" Tettimer (1922-2000), related to Richardson through his maternal grandmother.
Left: Newspaper clipping of Jesse Franklin "Buck" Richardson's obituary (Star Democrat, Easton, Maryland, June 24, 1970. Copied from Bill Tettimer's scrapbook, August 1999.
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Below, left: Buck's son Capt. Frank Richardson holding a tautog (Tautoga onitis) on board a fishlighter. The photograph was probably taken to document the tautog as an unexpected catch. Copied from Bill Tettimer's scrapbook, August 1999.
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Below, right: Bill Tettimer with a soft crab shedding tank, St. Leonard, Maryland, August 1984. Photograph by Paula J. Johnson, Calvert Marine Museum Archives, PRP-PJ139-001.
Parkers Creek Fishery: the Camp
A plat recorded in 1926 shows Richardson and Corkran's camp just south of the mouth of Parkers Creek, with fishing shanty and shed. The two watermen sold the lot in August 1926 but arranged with later owners to continue using the site.
Detail of 1926 real estate plat showing fishermen’s shanty and shed on 7.7-acre lot at mouth of Parkers Creek. The full plat at upper left represents the property later known as Warrior's Rest, now owned by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and managed by the ACLT. (Calvert County Circuit Court Land Records, Plat AAH 13: 592)
The camp evolved over time. Shanties provided a shelter where the captain and crew could prepare and eat meals, pass the evenings, and sleep. The shanty platted in 1926 was in the center of the open flat area. The 1950-era shanty in the photograph below was built at the base of the high bank. Access to the camp by land was via a ravine where Frank Richardson later installed a road. A photo of the camp in the 1950s shows the expanded shanty resting on masonry piers, with a television aerial that indicates it had electrical service.
Frank Richardson's two-room shanty and accessory buildings at his Parkers Creek fishing camp, looking southwest. The Chevrolet dates the picture as 1952 or later. (Calvert Marine Museum Archives, CMM P-18969
By the 1950s, a net shed was set up near the bay, next to a station where tar was heated and applied to the nets as a preservative. A series of low racks north of the twine house were used to elevate, dry, mend, and equip the nets. As the nets were tarred or treated, they'd be spread on the racks to dry. In later years, the tar was replaced with a longer lasting copper based antifouling preservative that was applied to the nets.
Parkers Creek fishing camp, probably in the 1950s, looking southeast. The photograph shows Capt. Frank Richardson's net tarring station and twine house with fishermen preparing nets. (The authors assembled this panoramic view from two sequential photographs in the Calvert Marine Museum Archives, CMM P-11942 and CMM P-11944.)
Captain and Crew
Over the years, Capt. Buck Richardson's crew including his sons William Franklin "Frank" Richardson (1906-1988) and John Alexander "Alex" Richardson (1914-1983), his brother-in-law Zeke Corkran, his grandnephew Bill Tettimer, and other men from Oxford. He also employed local Calvert County African American men, including members of the Commodore, Waul (or Wall), and Boots families.
The Commodore family owned a farm that flanked the south side of Parkers Creek a short distance to the west. The 1940 census lists four Commodore men working as laborers in the "Fishing Nets" industry: Willis Commodore, 50; John Commodore, 34, Dewey Commodore, 38, and Archie Commodore, 25. The census records report that the men worked 50 hours a week. In a 1999 interview, Tettimer described the Commodore men as "damn good workers." Whereas the men from Oxford lived at the fishing camp during the work week, local members of the fishing crew went home at the end of each workday.
Crew members working at the net drying racks at the mouth of Parkers Creek, probably in the 1940s or 1950s. (Calvert Marine Museum Archives, CMM P-11943.) According to Bill Tettimer, the vertical stakes in the background formed a breakwater installed by Frank Richardson to help stabilize the mouth of Parkers Creek.
Tettimer said that Buck Richardson retired from pound netting in 1941 while his son, based at Parkers Creek, continued fishing until at least the 1950s. Bill Tettimer worked for Frank Richardson in 1940 and 1941. He recalled the winter of 1941, when the crew went to Parkers Creek to "mend twine" but became stranded there for a week by a snowstorm. They were finally rescued by three of the Commodore men who used oxen to tow their automobiles. "We were 12 hours getting out," Tettimer said, with the "oxen pulling them two automobiles. And the only way to get them out was to go over them gullies instead of going through them, that was a bad snowstorm."
A general decline in fish stocks combined with rising equipment and labor costs to spell the end of the pound net fisheries at Parkers Creek and Flag Ponds. Younger fishermen could not afford the capital investment needed to purchase and set up a pound net outfit and, due to the availability of more lucrative land-based jobs, it was difficult to employ a dependable workforce
Acknowledgements
This webpage is an abridged version of Robert J. Hurry's article "Pound Net Fishery at Parkers Creek," published in the 2025 issue of the Calvert Historian. The Calvert Historian a publication of the Calvert County Historical Society. The society has a website and a contact page.