The Reedville Fishermen’s Museum has told the story of Reedville through programs and exhibitions since it was founded in 1988. This community institution has enjoyed a long history with Virginia Humanities and its Virginia Folklife Program; this past summer marked their most recent collaboration, when a team of Folklife interns helped transcribe a set of oral history interviews conducted by the museum in the early 2000s. 

By intertwining Virginia Folklife Program archival materials from Reedville with present-day voices, we hope to give insight into the past and future of this beloved community museum. 

The Town Fish Built

If you visit Reedville, you are almost guaranteed to hear the phrase, “This was once the wealthiest city per capita in the United States.” And it’s true—the mansions of “Millionaire’s Row” are a relic of the immense wealth that once sat along the shores of Cockrell Creek.

In the early twentieth century, Reedville was the center of the country’s menhaden fishing industry thanks to Elijah Reed, the town’s namesake. Menhaden is an essential component in industrial and agricultural products like fertilizer, paint, bait, and animal feed, as well consumable omega-3 supplements. Menhaden travel in massive schools and historically required nets pulled by large crews to bring in thousands of fish at a time. 

The cultural landscape of Reedville was shaped by the menhaden fishing industry. Descendants of ship captains (typically white) and crews (largely African American) that continue to live in Reedville take pride in this fishing heritage, even as fewer people earn their living on the water. Fourth of July parades featured dapper menhaden floats, like this 1991 celebration documented in Virginia Humanities’ archives. 

Since 1970, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church has organized a Blessing of the Fleet boat parade and ceremony, which is co-hosted today by Omega Protein, the last menhaden reduction fishery on the East Coast and an essential, if at times controversial, employer for the region. Thanks to Omega Protein, today Reedville is still one of the “major ports for the landing of commercial fish in the United States, second only to Kodiak, Alaska,” according to the museum’s website.

A Community Museum Grows

As menhaden fishing grew increasingly mechanized and required fewer workers, retiring watermen and women were eager to ensure that their stories were told and their memories preserved for generations to come. In 1988, the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum was founded.

In 1989, Garry Barrow, the first Virginia state folklorist, began collaborating with the museum. Barrow worked intimately with its volunteer leadership team during its founding years to help develop its original exhibitions.

Letters between Barrow and Alice Butler, president of the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum in the early 1990s, detail their discussions of grant applications, applications from potential curators, and the future of the museum. In 1991, Virginia Humanities awarded a planning grant to the Greater Reedville Association to support the development of the museum’s first exhibition, which included collecting oral histories “that are eloquent, funny, informative, and often profound.”

In 1993, the museum worked with the Virginia Folklife Program to develop a successful application for a $23,000 Virginia Humanities grant to produce a permanent and traveling exhibition on “the region’s four major fishing traditions—pound net fishing, crabbing, menhaden fishing, and oystering, and on the related expressive and material traditions of net mending, boat building, and chantey singing.” 

Over the next ten years, the museum would be awarded more than $25,000 in additional grants from Virginia Humanities to support its ongoing oral history initiatives and community-engaged events. “We had a story to tell. So we told it,” Clarice Williams said in a 2022 interview with Katy Clune, current state folklorist. 

Williams was born in Rocky Mount, Virginia, in 1924 but grew up in Reedville as the daughter of a Methodist minister. She was part of the core group of volunteers that helped launch the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum.

“Everybody wanted to be involved, we had no trouble getting anybody to do anything. They were there,” she said. 

That was the founding spirit of the museum— a local history needed to be told, so its people came together and made it happen. 

Virginia’s Chantey Singers

Almost from its very beginning, the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum sought to uplift a unique local tradition: chantey singing. 

Until the 1960s, a menhaden fishing boat would send out smaller “purse boats” to unfurl long nets and encircle the fish. After the crew pulled the nets tight, forcing the fish to the surface, they had to work in unison to haul the full, heavy nets on board. Singing helped coordinate this task.

“They sang together, and then they pulled together,” explained Captain Charles R. Winstead, Jr. in a 2005 interview transcribed by the Virginia Folklife Program for the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum.

Born in Hendersonville in 1950, Winstead was known for being one of the best chantey leaders, sometimes on the request of other captains. 

“I been to Captain Fred Haney several times, more than once because he had a set of fish he couldn’t raise. I’d go to him, and I’d raise them,” he said. “To determine when to start singing, you’d get [the fish] as tight as you could get them. … You put [the crew] all together singing, and when they stopped singing, they all pulled together. And that made a big difference.”

By 1960, however, commercial fishing boats were transitioning to the newly invented hydraulic power block, a revolution in fishing technology. Men were no longer needed to pull nets, boat crews got smaller, and there was no more reason to sing. 

In 1991, Alice Butler invited William Hudnall to organize a performance of chantey singing for the museum’s Fourth of July celebration, which also honored breaking ground on a new building. 

Hudnall and his wife hosted six retired fishermen from Lancaster and Northumberland Counties, including Captain Charles Winstead, in their home for rehearsals. Before their performance—their first public appearance—Hudnall remarked, “When I talked to these men about arranging a group to sing chanteys, some of them looked at me strange, and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I said ‘No, seriously!’ Now what happened is there are chanteys and there are chanteys. All the things that were sung on the fishboat can’t be sung here. Now fortunately, every member of this group is a deacon, except one, and that one is a deacon son. So you will be safe today with the chanteys.”  The Virginia Folklife Program documented this performance and an earlier rehearsal in June of that year.  

Following this successful appearance, a few local men came together to organize a professional group: the Northern Neck Chantey Singers. They performed Chesapeake Bay sea chanteys across the country during the 1990s and early 2000s. They recorded their 1993 album, See You When the Sun Comes Down, as part of the museum’s larger oral history project with support from the Virginia Folklife Program. Membership changed over the years, and in 2003 Lloyd Hill joined the group and began leading the onstage performances.

“Singing has always been part of manual labor. … It made the time pass, made it go better, it maybe eased the burden. And it’s all like a shared agony, shared misery. You and your partner have been working together. You both are tired, but nobody wants to give up, so you keep pulling.”

In 2011, the chanteymen were approaching their 70s. They apprenticed a new member, Lewis R. Blackwell, with support from the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program, in an effort to keep the tradition going. Their performance at the 2011 Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase includes their trademark banter and demonstration on how the maneuvers of the fishing net and the chorus of the chanteys worked together.

The End of a Tradition

In 2022, more than a decade later, Liz Buxton, then director of the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum, consulted with the Virginia Folklife Program on a grant application to digitize oral histories collected in the 2000s. While the museum did not receive grant funding, a team of interns from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Public History transcribed the interviews and Clune completed oral history interviews with Lloyd Hill and Clarice Williams on behalf of the museum.

Hill explained he thought it was unlikely the Northern Neck Chantey Singers would perform again. Their manager, Elton Smith, was 96 at the time of the interview. Two members had passed away since the outset of the pandemic. “I don’t know if I could get five or six guys together [to sing], to make it meaningful,” Hill said.

In their prime, the group was reliant on festival performances outside of Reedville to mostly white audiences. 

“People away appreciated [the chanteys] more than the people here, that probably lived a part of it. They didn’t appreciate it,” Hill said. “But, by the way, we were sometimes like young rock stars. People would gather around us, and we would tell our stories. At the Urbanna Oyster Fest, little kids would be around looking at the nets and stuff. We had kids pulling in nets. So they kind of enjoyed it. But all that kind of went away.”

Reedville chantey singing is bound to survive only in recordings, and this fate seems inevitable — appropriate, even — for work songs that were born from the legacy of slavery with no remaining context.

“Back in my father’s day, almost the entire crew was Black fisherman. The captain would be white, but everybody else would be Black,” Hill said. “It would be hard to find a Black waterman that currently works in Lancaster County. … I can’t name a waterman that makes his living from oystering and crabbing and gill netting and hull setting and pound netting. It isn’t happening anymore.”

Despite all the complications, Hill is still committed to ensuring people remember the chanteys: “When you learn from your past, you can just see what a proud heritage you are descended from. To let this die out would be just like saying that you don’t need libraries.”

Adapting a Community Museum for the Future

How does a museum dedicated to past ways of life remain relevant to its changing community? 

Shauna McCranie, who has served as executive director of Reedville Fishermen’s Museum since June 2023, is harnessing the museum’s original spirit of community commitment and working to find new ways to make the organization sustainable. She has big goals: building expansions, more community events (such as art classes and concerts), and new ways to engage young people in their local history. In August 2023 she helped appoint the museum’s first teen board member, Anne Shackleford. 

McCranie also wants to empower Reedvillians to share and preserve their own stories, in line with the museum’s goals since its founding. Support from the Virginia Folklife Program helped revive its oral history initiative, and now McCranie is hoping to get area youth involved. The museum is exploring possible partnerships with the Northumberland County Boys and Girls Club and ways to honor the remaining Northern Neck Chantey Singers at home, in their own community. 

Like all local history institutions, the Reedville Fishermen’s Museum must also root itself in the present if it wants to continue to thrive. As the museum’s past president Alice Butler wrote more than twenty years ago, “We are making history. Let’s preserve it.” 

Reprinted with permission from Virginia Humanities - thank you!  For the original version with additional media, please visit