Boat building has a rich history around Mobile Bay. As in most communities that rely on the water, boats were built to serve practical purposes. They were tools. Lawrence Stauter, whose Stauter Built Boats are synonymous with Mobile Bay and the Delta, designed and built his boats to be optimal fishing boats for our local waters. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Lawrence was a creature of the water. It was his livelihood and his highway, as well as his playground. Building a boat was a matter of survival, before it was a matter of making a living. For thousands of years before Lawrence Stauter built his first boat in the delta marsh, humans have taken to the waters for sustenance and transport. For the vast majority of this history, boats have been made of wood. 

Bayou La Batre

Bayou La Batre was founded in 1786 when Joseph Bouzage was awarded a 1,259-acre Spanish land grant. It is named for the French battery that was later installed there, the Battery Bayou. Beginning in the 1920’s, seafood production became the central industry. While it was incorporated in 1955, Bayou La Batre is still better described as a seafood community. 

Like the mill towns of years past, in which everyone in the community participates, directly or indirectly, in the industry that dominates, everyone in Bayou La Batre deals in seafood. However, unlike a mill town, the economy is not dominated by a single, all-powerful employer. Bayou La Batre is, or was, a nearly vertically integrated economy of family-owned local suppliers and consumers. They made the nets, built the boats, and processed the catch, all on the bayou. No matter their position in the supply chain, though, everyone in Bayou La Batre seems to have made at least part of their living on the water.

As part of family businesses, children learned the skills to participate in the industry from the previous generation, often from a young age. “The only qualification I had to have to start shrimping [with my father] was to be able to wipe my own ass”, one shrimper told me. 

Local constraints in the case of the oyster, and global competition in the case of the shrimp have together changed the economics of the Bayou La Batre seafood industry and the way of life that has existed for generations. 

This is not a sad story, though, just a story of change. Bayou La Batre now boasts a massive shipbuilding industry. But these enormous hunks of steel are built for the Navy and the oil and gas industry. There hasn’t been a shrimp boat built on the bayou in years. 

There are still mom and pop seafood shops, and shrimp boats still line the bayou, but their children are largely finding other opportunities. Again, the economics have changed, but with the shift, certain skills that have been passed down for generations are becoming obsolete. Among them, wooden boat building. 

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Bosarge Boat Works

“At that specific time, everybody and their brother would build [boats],” says David Bosarge. David was born and raised in Bayou La Batre. As a young man, David learned to build boats from his uncle, Floyd Bosarge. “They might bring a boat to Uncle Floyd to have a piece cut out, then they would take it home and build it back themselves.” Floyd learned to build boats from his older relative Garland Bosarge. It’s easy to imagine tracing this generational education all the way back to Joseph Bouzage. 

David started working summers for Floyd in seventh grade. At that time, Floyd would tong oysters in the winter and build boats the rest of the year. His boats, however, started gaining popularity among those working on the water along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, especially oystering. By the early 1970s, Floyd was building boats full time. David joined the business year-round in 1976 as demand was picking up. “From the late 70’s to the mid 80’s it was all you could do to keep up,” says David. They were turning out a skiff every day and a half and still kept a backlog of fifteen to twenty boats. 

“At that time, all of the oyster reefs stayed open seven days a week, 365 days a year. People would go out and get oysters, bring them back to their house and sell them. There would be a [oyster] shop on this side of the road, two shops there, and another 100 yards there’d be a shop. They just dotted the landscape all the way down the bayou.”

The story of the oyster in Mobile Bay and the Mississippi Sound is a tragic one. Several factors contributed to the demise of wild oysters in these waters, including environmental degradation and overharvest over many years. This story is well documented by other sources, but by the end of the 1980s oysters in the waters around Bayou La Batre were nearly depleted. “Everything kind of bottomed out after that, and I moved on”. 

As business slowed, David began working at a chemical plant on the industrial canal, which he would spend the rest of his career doing. He never quit building boats though. Neither did Floyd, for that matter; he built his last boat 3 months before he passed in 2007. David reckons Floyd, “built a thousand of these [skiffs], all by hand, maybe more than that.” 

Recently retired, David now builds 10 to 12 boats a year of the same basic model that he built with his uncle. 18’ long, 5.5’ beam, flat bottom. David said, “He had something that worked; there’s no reason for me to play around with it.” No two boats are the same, though. He does make some with V-hulls, and builds the interior to suit the customer. David has Floyd’s old patterns but does not work off of any kind of plan, just “some notes I have jotted down.” Now most of his boats go to other retirees looking for something to piddle about in.

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Landry Boat Works

Landry Boat Works was founded by Roy Landry “right at the tail end of WWII” to repair boats in Bayou La Batre. Upon return from their duties in the war, his two brothers, Joe and Shine, joined him in the business. Currently, Rena Landry is the third-generation Landry to run the operation. The business started as a boat repair yard, but quickly the brothers began building boats, particularly shrimp boats. Sizes varied, but a typical Landry shrimp boat was 85’ long with a 20’ beam, built “with mahogany planks, cypress framing, and treated pine deck and bulwarks.”

Beginning in the late 60’s, Rena says they were “hot and heavy” building shrimp boats. They had a 45-man crew and were pushing out a shrimp boat every eight to ten weeks. They had contracts to build boats going out twelve months, which may have been longer but, “Daddy wouldn’t go any longer than 12 months.” There was such demand for the Landry shrimp boats that a market developed for the contracts. Shrimpers would buy others' contracts to move up in line and get their boat sooner. 

Rena said things started “tailing off” in the 80s. “The whole shrimping industry started going a little bit downwards.” Steel shrimp boats were coming on to the scene at this point as well. “With three good men, you could put 4 or 5 planks on a boat in a day. [Steel boat builders] would take two men and put a ten-foot by forty-foot plate on in a day, then bring someone in that night to weld it out. It’s hard to compete with that.” One Bayou La Batre shipyard was delivering one steel shrimp boat every week. 

As sales slowed, the Landrys would build a boat and put it in their own fleet of shrimp boats. If someone was interested in buying it, they would sell it “ready to go” out of their fleet. Eventually, Landry quit building boats altogether. They built their last shrimp boat in 1988 and have operated as a repair yard for wood and fiberglass boats ever since. From the early 1950’s to until 1988, Landry Boatworks built about 180 boats, many of which are still active today. 

Rena recently sold Landry Boat Works to a long-time customer, Stephen Sanger. Rena told me, “Used to, everyone from Texas to the Big Bend of Florida would bring their boat to be hauled out here.” No doubt Stephen is looking to put Landry back on the map. Finding qualified help is already a challenge. Stephen’s boats, scale replicas of two of Columbus’s ships, The Nina and The Pinta, were built in South America. With those connections, he is hoping to recruit a couple of shipwrights from there.

The Last True Craftsmen

There seems to have been a heyday of wooden boats around Mobile Bay. A brief moment from the 60’s into the 80’s during which hard-won skill and craftsmanship aligned with market demand. A time when local craftsmen produced quality products that could not be matched, even with supposedly better materials. But the last of these craftsmen are getting old, and all that remains is a chicken-and-egg problem. 

Did no one younger learn these skills because there was no market for wooden boats, or is there no market because no one learned the skills to build them of the same quality as before? Maybe both. David said, “I think it’s dying for a couple reasons: I’m almost 70, I’m not going to be doing it much longer, and nobody behind me is doing it, and there is very little demand. The combination of the two is taking it down.”

Whatever the case is, the fleet of wooden boats on the Gulf Coast is shrinking. Each year storms, decay, and wood-eating worms claim more wooden boats than are built. Rena believes the advent of the portable lift did more damage to the fleet than any storm. 

“[David and Rena] are the last two true craftsmen,” Freddie Stewart said. Freddie owns a shrimp boat built by Bosarge Boat Works (they built a few shrimp boats too) that he operates out of Bon Secour. Sidney Schwartz owns and operates a Landry shrimp boat out of Dog River. I went to see these boats and visit with their captains. I hoped to find a bit of romanticism for these boats and the fact that they are disappearing, but what I found was mostly practicality. They are just tools, with advantages and disadvantages to the alternatives. Perhaps David summed it up well when he said bluntly about his dying craft, “It’s sad, but it’s inevitable.”