EP 540. The Chesapeake Bay Legends

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MoJo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in Maryland, a little community called Bel Air, with my friend John Sullivan. One of the most amazing Chesapeake Bay collections, probably in the world. John is an expert. He’s been on here before. You all can look down below at the caption and see that last interview we did. But we’re following up. I’m just completing a massive tour of his museum. It is nothing short of amazing. John, how the heck are you? Thanks for having me today.
John Sullivan: Ramsey, thanks for being here. Looking forward to talking to you and telling you some stories. Everything in this house has a story. I can assure you of that.
Ramsey Russell: You know, that’s what I think museums are, though. I’ve had this conversation before, John. A lot of people go to a museum to see stuff, but it’s the stories that stuff represents. That’s what a museum is, just a collection of stories.

John Sullivan: “John Holly’s decoys are artifacts of a bygone era’s craftsmanship. They’re more than tools—they’re storytellers.”

John Sullivan: Well, let me tell you a little story, Ramsey. Sitting behind me on this shelf, there’s a pair of miniature flying decoys made in the city of Havre de Grace by a carver by the name of Tom Bernard. Back in the 1970s, I had a wonderful relationship with all the surviving members of the Bernard family, Charles Nelson Bernard and his brother Tom Bernard being the most famous carvers. The family put me onto a family member who was selling a group of miniature decoys. I visited the family member. Out comes this lard tin, if anyone remembers what a lard tin is, a big large tin. Sometimes they sold potato chips in them or popcorn in a similar tin. The can comes out. Wrapped inside this big can were these miniature swan decoys. Charles Nelson Bernard’s older brother, Tom Bernard, who died in 1926, was the carver of these swans. Totally unique in style from any other miniatures from the city of Havre de Grace. A wonderful little paddle tail, a great carved neck. When I purchased this group, one at a time, all wrapped up in paper towels, as I approached the bottom of the tin, out comes this pair of flying miniature canvasbacks. Metal wings, scalloped across the back, maybe six inches in length and six inches across the wings with their original little wires to hang them as a Christmas decoration, the bottom of a Christmas tree. The swans were sitting on a large mirror to reflect similarity to a body of water, and the canvasbacks would hang above them. I purchased all the decoys in this tin, carried them home, and I’d had them about a year or so. All of a sudden, I get a phone call from an attorney. A lawsuit evolved about the sale of these, and it was a nasty divorce, apparently, that happens in life, I believe from time to time. I had to return the pair of flying canvasbacks. That was the end of it. I got over it. I lived with them for a while, but they went back. About two months ago, I got a call from the survivor of the family and the survivor of the divorce. Was I still interested in a pair of decoys? I’d completely forgotten exactly what they looked like. I drove to Havre de Grace, went to the same house where I bought them before. Out comes the tin. And in the bottom of the tin, still wrapped in the paper towels, was this pair of flying canvasbacks. They came home with me that day, along with the lard tin. The lard tin had been painted over the original logo from the company, painted cream with a black band around it, and became a decorative item in itself. But the smell that wafted out of that can reminded me of that same experience when I’d been there in the 1970s buying the group of them. You wonder why anyone would go to that trouble. I’ve come to the conclusion with many of these carvings from the city of Havre de Grace, it’s because they could. They put a little extra talent into carving this miniature because they knew it wasn’t a decoy that would be thrown out around a sink box or a bushwhack boat. It’s an object, an ornament that would be in someone’s house as long as it exists. And so they left the Bernard family’s lard tin and the Bernard family’s Christmas garden. They came home and are sitting behind me on this shelf today because the carver could, and he had a specific purpose. I’ve noticed that with many of these carvers, they made something just a little special. If you go to Havre de Grace and visit the decoy museum there, there’s a pair of decoys by James T. Holly and his father, John Daddy Holly, that were a wedding present in 1883. We know exactly where those decoys sat from the time they were made. They never left the house when they were a wedding present in 1883, and they stayed there the whole time. Probably one of the most unique pairs of decoys from the Susquehanna Flats area.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Put us on a timeline, John. Your whole home is an amazing museum. You’ve been collecting for a very long time. What era of American history would you say all of this represents?
John Sullivan: What you’re looking at in my house, in the way of water fowling artifacts, dates probably, in my opinion, from the 1840s up to the 1940s. There might be a few more contemporary pieces than that, but for the most part, the body of the work displayed in this house is in that time period. The earliest decoys are from the 1840s, prior to the Civil War, when the sink box, we think the design of that came from the Long Island, Oyster Bay area up in New York, traveled to the city of Havre de Grace in the 1840s and 1850s and became very popular. Finally outlawed in 1934. When you think of a gunner in a sink box, a unique maritime artifact, a boat that’s very coffin-like in its shape, the hunter would sit surrounded by iron decoys to weight it to the proper level, and then wooden decoys wing ducks further out on the actual wing of that box. Outlawed in 1934 because of the technical advances in shotguns. Initially, it would have been a flintlock gun in there. So the hunter, if he had two of them, he might get two shots off. Then a percussion gun, and if he had two guns with him, maybe he’d get a couple from a percussion, two shots in each barrel, and he’d have two guns with him. Along comes the breech loader, and that technology allowed him to shoot more ducks. Finally, John Browning, with the invention of the automatic repeating shotgun, became too lethal for the duck population. The hunter became too successful over a period from 1840 into 1911, I think, with the invention of the automatic gun.

John Sullivan: “Punt guns were tools of a different time. They’re relics of an era when conservation wasn’t a priority, but they’re still part of our history.”

Ramsey Russell: When did the punt gun and the battery gun emerge in the American timeline of duck hunting? And did it originate here or in the old country?
John Sullivan: Probably that technology came from Great Britain, where they’re still legal today. But Maryland was unique in the fact that they outlawed the use of big bore guns by 1832. The description they used for a big bore gun was something that could not be conveniently fired from the shoulder. That was the definition they used. They never referred to bore, the weight of the gun, or the spread of the shot, but they referred to whether it could be conveniently fired from the shoulder. In most punt guns, as you can imagine, it takes two men to pick them up, usually. So they’re not going to be holding it against their arm. They would be mounted in the front of a gunning skiff, usually with a sandbag underneath them, and tied to the boat with the trunnions that would stick out on the side of the gun. They’d get one shot off, and if they were successful, they might get 20 to 50 birds with one shot. But that was it for the night.

Ramsey Russell: Nearly three-quarters of a century before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Maryland had banned the use of punt guns or guns that weren’t convenient to shoot now. Talk about convenient to shoot. You showed me a new acquisition you’ve got here. It was a four bore, side-by-side, four gauge. It weighs 22 pounds, and I cannot imagine pulling the trigger on that. I just can’t imagine shouldering that and pulling the trigger.
John Sullivan: It would put you back a little bit.
Ramsey Russell: I believe it would.
John Sullivan: I think you’d want to have something behind you when you fire that gun.
Ramsey Russell: Maybe. I don’t know that I’d want to fire that gun. But do you reckon it saw? I mean, I would think that they were probably shooting that gun at stationary birds. I don’t think they could swing a 22-pound side by side.
John Sullivan: They wouldn’t do much swinging, that’s for sure. Percy Thayer Blogg wrote a book called There Are No Dull Dark Days. And he referred to gunning in Baltimore County at Miller’s Island. And he fired a four-bore gun, and they called him Big Bore Blogg. That was his nickname because he was the one that handled the four-bore gun.
Ramsey Russell: Why is that period of time, like, say, 1840 to 1940, why is that the house sign good old days? What is it about that period of time that so embodies American water fowling? If you had to guess, what was going on differently than before that or after that, that made that period of time, it’s like the whole duck hunting world revolve round that.
John Sullivan: Well, you had these wealthy sportsmen, and they saw what the market hunters were doing, selling these ducks up and down the coast, with the canvasback being the king. Some of them were even shipped overseas to England in the early days. But you had the canvasback duck being sold in markets in New York and Philadelphia. And these wealthy sportsmen got the idea that they should get involved in this. They could have some fun doing this. These clubs were being organized, and, in fact, they had strict regulations. They were sort of the first conservationists, in reality. They limited how many days they could shoot in a row, how many ducks they could shoot, and who would use which blind. For example, Carroll’s Island had records going back to the 1840s when it was first organized. That’s in Baltimore County. But here in Harford County, you had the Spasuti Island Rod and Gun Club, an early organized club on the Susquehanna Flats, right outside of Havre de Grace. You know, they had strict regulations for clubs and their members.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. We’re sitting in Bel Air, Maryland, your home now. And I asked you as I was pulling in, it said, Historic Bel Air. And I know this ain’t got anything, I know the answer because you told me it doesn’t have anything to do with duck hunting, but I still find it interesting. What is the historic significance of Bel Air?
John Sullivan: One of the more significant features of the history was right down the road. You had the home of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. His father was even more famous in the theater world, but he was overshadowed by the evil deed of John Wilkes Booth. That was a drawing card to the area many years ago. The home was actually open for tours, and the county now has taken over the ownership of the property. It’s open a few times a year. It’s a wonderful home. I mean, it’s a historic cottage in itself. But that’s the dark side of the history of the town of Bel Air.

Ramsey Russell: Is this your hometown?
John Sullivan: Actually, Fallston is my hometown, which is about two miles away from where we’re sitting downtown Fallston. I grew up there and moved this great distance of two miles away from my birthplace. And that’s where my son and my grandsons live to this day.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, okay. How did you get into collecting, and why this period of time in waterfowl?
John Sullivan: What led me to this was a pair of decoys that sat on the family’s fireplace hearth in that home in Fallston. Two decoys were presented to my father in 1948 by one of the county assessors, someone he worked with who was a great waterfowler. He owned property on Aberdeen Proving Ground. When the Army bought all that property for the development of the proving ground, army brought all that property.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me about those decoys. What were they?
John Sullivan: It was two canvasbacks. One was by John Graham, a Cecil County carver, and the other by Holly from Havre de Grace. They’re still in the house to this day. They’re my prized possessions, but now they belong to my son since he’s the custodian of them. These two decoys were given to my father by Grayson Hopkins, his mentor and then my mentor when I became a county assessor. I was attracted to these two decoys at a young age, and they’d go up to my bedroom for display instead of the family’s fireplace hearth. Finally, because of that, my grandmother, to save my parents’ decoys, gave me my own canvasback. It’s been in my life since I was 13 years old. And as we sit here today, it’s about six feet away from me on the shelf. It took me a long time to figure out where it was carved, but it was carved over in the Cecil County side of the Susquehanna Flats by Benjamin Dye. On the bottom of that decoy, there’s a carved letter H. It took me maybe 20 years to figure out what that H stood for, but it was from Jesse Heisler, a gunner in Cecil County. I’ve acquired some others with the exact H carved on the underside. In the lower level of my home, I have his sink box. The fact that I have a decoy upstairs and a couple downstairs carved by this carver, Benjamin Dye, in Cecil County, and they’re sitting next to that sink box in my home, it’s the  connection there. The stories keep coming. We could go on and on sharing this history, but it’s been a passion of mine for a long time now.

Ramsey Russell: Did you grow up hunting waterfowl with your dad at all?
John Sullivan: No.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
John Sullivan: No. The only connection to the hunting era from the early days was the fact that my grandfather was living on the Bush River Neck, which became a part of the proving ground. We were the only family in the Fallston area that had a Chesapeake Bay retriever. I could never understand why we had Chesapeake Bay retrievers because we were not a waterfowling family. Researching my family’s genealogy led me back to my grandfather living on this farm owned by a gentleman with the last name of Hyde, H-Y-D-E. Hyde owned champion Chesapeake Bay retrievers and showed them in Baltimore City at the Chesapeake Bay Retriever Show in 1890. So my grandfather had grown up around these dogs. It was the only dog acceptable to me. We’d see these other little dogs, and our family just shook their heads because we always had these great Chesapeakes around us. Growing up with those dogs, never using them as retrievers, just growing up with them, was a great part of my childhood.

Ramsey Russell: Sure. When did you get serious after that first couple of decoys? At 13 years old, you start getting older. When did you start falling down the rabbit hole of amassing a collection? And what was your interest in the absence of having grown up a duck hunter?
John Sullivan: One thing that really dug the depth of that rabbit hole was working with one of the most famous carvers from the region. Madison Mitchell’s son, R. Madison Mitchell Jr, was a building inspector for the county, and I was a young assessor. I was buying Mr. Mitchell’s decoys from his son for $6 apiece for ducks and $8 apiece for a Canada goose.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll give you twice that right now, but go ahead.

John Sullivan: They’re worth a bit more than that today. But prior to my introduction to young Mitchell, after I got my driver’s license, I just had this need to have more than this one decoy that was given by my grandmother. I’d go to every antique shop, yard sale, or flea market looking for anything that looked like a duck. I grew out of that quickly when I started buying the Mitchell decoys and refined my collecting, particularly to Havre de Grace and then to the Upper Bay. That spread now up and down the coast to other counties and even branched out a little bit to buy a few North Carolina decoys and a few Virginia decoys. But R. Madison Mitchell Jr. really got me hooked on those six-dollar ducks. And then one day, he showed up. We’d park our cars together on a Monday morning, and I’d exchange some dollars for a few decoys that were in the back of the car. He got the idea, somehow, I must have suggested to him, that I really liked some of the old decoys. A hunter would go into Mr. Mitchell’s shop wanting his old decoys refurbished, and Madison Mitchell Jr. would exchange that hunter’s old decoys for new Mitchell decoys, which the hunter preferred. I preferred the old ones. So it worked to my advantage, I think, getting those older decoys through the Mitchell shop. And, of course, none of those things have ever left me. They’re still here with me. I do a couple of decoy shows a year, but I’m not known to sell anything. And as you walk around, you might have noticed that I tend to keep a lot more than I’ve ever sold. Sadly, when I have sold a few things, a weakness of mine or maybe just needing some extra money, I have regretted every one that I’ve sold. In more recent years, I’ve bought back some of the ones that I sold years ago. You can look at the stock market, you can look at inflation. But when it comes to me buying back something, it seems to be no holds barred because it was once mine, and I want it back.

Ramsey Russell: You know, you talk about the stock market and investment value. How would somebody listening that might want to go buy a few decoys or a few antiquities in the waterfowling world, how would that stack up to stock market returns?

John Sullivan: Well, it would be like buying. I would never suggest that anyone go out and buy stocks without the advice of a knowledgeable investment counselor. And I’m going to say the same exact thing about a decoy. There are a lot of people who will take advantage of a new collector, and I don’t want that to happen to anyone. So I would recommend they go to someone with a good reputation, and that seller would offer them their verbal guarantee and say, “This is what it is.” All of the auction houses now are forced to do that because, believe it or not, as in the general world of antiquities, when they were copying famous oil paintings hundreds of years ago, many hundreds of years ago. The same thing has happened in the decoy world. Someone will quickly take advantage of an unknowledgeable collector and sell them something that’s not right. When I say “not right,” I’ve seen copies of really good decoys that were made 50 years ago. So they’ve become old, they’ve become an antique just by sitting around. They’re no better than something that’s brand new, sadly.

Ramsey Russell: How quickly do they appreciate? Do you have an opinion on that? Like they say, the historic stock market return is 12.5% a year on average. But I mean, how do you calculate return on this cultural art, this cultural antiquity, I wonder. I mean, I’ll tell you this. I bought way back when the Internet was brand new and eBay came out, I just stumbled across, you know, that’s a pretty decoy. That’s a nice decoy, but it was affordable. A pair of Madison Mitchells for $150, walking around Easton, Maryland, looking in shop windows, it’s appreciated really well compared to that. I mean, you know, and I just got lucky. And so I just wondered how you would compare it. If there’s a way to compare it, it’s probably a lot more liquid, I would think. If I bought that pair of decoys, I mean, and wanted to go on a trip and sell them, I would think I could sell them at an appreciated rate more quickly than I could stocks and bonds or something.

John Sullivan: Just so you’re not in a hurry to sell them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you got to be patient.

John Sullivan: You have to be patient with it. And, I know a few collectors that look at a decoy and they see dollar signs. I look at a decoy, and I look for the history. I look for the story. I like to know where it was used and who used it, how it was used. It’s so important. That’s much more important to me than putting a dollar sign on that decoy because every one of the pieces in this house will tell you a story.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of that, let’s start with this story. You showed me the layout boat, the downstairs with the curtains on it.

John Sullivan: The sink box.

Ramsey Russell: “The Chesapeake Bay’s sink box history is a window into America’s waterfowling soul. Those carvers didn’t just shape wood—they shaped a legacy.”

Ramsey Russell: The sink box. What’s the story on that sink box? What’s the history and origins of that sink box?
John Sullivan: Well, I mentioned that it was in the Heisler family. I mentioned that in talking about the first decoy. At one point, I had a few oyster cans that I was collecting. A friend of mine came by. It was about the time of the Billy Beer can phenomenon, if we all remember that, and people were collecting beer cans. This older gentleman came by, and I had these oyster cans displayed in my kitchen on top of the kitchen cabinets. He looked up and said, “What are you doing with those things? The next thing, I’ll come in here, and you’ll have Billy Beer cans up there.” I said, “No, I don’t think so.” He left the house, and I got out some seafood boxes and packed up all of my oyster cans. I had about three boxes of oyster cans, and that’s when a decent oyster can was maybe $25 for the Chesapeake Bay area. I packed them all away. The collector came into my house sometime after I had packed those away and said, “I’m really surprised you don’t have any oyster cans.” I said, “Yeah, I got some oyster cans.” I opened up these boxes, and he said, “Maybe we could work out something. I have something you might like.” So I packed up the oyster cans and traveled to Dorchester County, Maryland, to a little area called Church Creek. There sitting in his barn, was this sink box. It was offered to me in a trade for those oyster cans. Now, oyster cans have increased in value more than I could have ever imagined, as hundreds, in some cases, into the thousands.

Ramsey Russell: And these were cans that oysters were packed and sold in.

John Sullivan: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Like a sardine can back in the day?
John Sullivan: Yes, but when we come to rarity and something I can enjoy, these cans were made in a factory, you know, with good lithographs on them, so they’re worth a couple thousand dollars. I have one sink box, and there might be a couple others in this region privately owned. Anytime you want a sink box, you’re going to have to go to a museum to see it. I take great pride in knowing exactly where the sink box was used, the family that used it, and a little bit of fun in the story of me trading oyster cans to get it. It sits in my house, and I have a dozen cast-iron sink box decoys resting in it and a group of club decoys on top of it with the club brands on the bottom, Carroll’s Islands, Spasuchi Island brands, and different brands from Haverty Grace and the region around it. It gives me a lot more pleasure than looking at a bunch of tin cans.

Ramsey Russell: Just like today, a lot of the tools of the trade were very specific. You’ve got the sink box blind used on big water. You’ve got other little boats you showed me. I think you called it an ice box. Best I understand, it was kind of like a sink box built to sit on ice.
John Sullivan: Right. Cut a hole in the ice and submerge the box, and you’d have boards extending out on the side. Probably the most uncomfortable means of duck hunting you could imagine.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, I mean, miserable.
John Sullivan: In addition to the cold weather, your life expectancy in that sink box, I think it would diminish quickly.
Ramsey Russell: I believe so. Tell me about the other little boat that’s next to the sink box. It’s got the three-barrel gun on the battery in front of it. How would they hunt with that?
John Sullivan: That could be used for a battery gun or a punt gun with night paddles.

Ramsey Russell: Night paddles?

John Sullivan: Yes, for paddling up on ducks as they’re rafted up at nighttime.
Ramsey Russell: So they didn’t really do the punt gunning and the battery gunning in the daytime?
John Sullivan: Always at night time.
Ramsey Russell: When the birds were rafted up out in the middle.
John Sullivan: And they’d use a light. They’d use a gunning light and paddle up to those ducks. The ducks would raise their heads when they saw that light, and they’d get that one shot off.
Ramsey Russell: What kind of light was it? It would it have been like a lantern?
John Sullivan: A lantern in a wooden box. There are a couple of examples of that downstairs.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, okay.
John Sullivan: You’d have a mirror in the back of a wooden box or metal box. I have one down there that’s made out of an old can and adapted to hold a lantern inside of it with a reflective back, a mirror behind it. It was very effective at getting the ducks to look at the light, then getting that one shot off. In the case of the battery gun, it would be three to five barrels that would go off.
Ramsey Russell: Reckon how many birds they were killing per trigger pull?
John Sullivan: Some bad shots, where the ducks weren’t properly rafted up, maybe 25 to 35 something like that. On a really good raft of ducks, you might get as many as 50 to 70 ducks.
Ramsey Russell: That would have been tough in pitch-black dark on big choppy water like the Chesapeake Bay, to start then rounding up all those birds.
John Sullivan: That would be a huge job at nighttime.
Ramsey Russell: That’s when the work starts.
John Sullivan: Right.
Ramsey Russell: They didn’t have cube beams to throw out there. That would have been a mess.
John Sullivan: Yeah, it would be a tremendous amount of work. For the money they were getting, the best pair of canvasbacks, they might have been getting $3 to $4 a pair to sell those at the market, the amount of time and effort put into shooting the ducks, getting prepared to shoot the ducks, and then going out and actually picking up your harvest, a tremendousamount of effort.
Ramsey Russell: I wonder how much time and forethought they gave to it. “Okay, tonight, because of these conditions, I’m going to go out and sink box hunt.” It doesn’t sound like something, like a modern-day passionate hunter would just go out and do every single night, just take what they get. I think a lot of thought, scouting, glassing, and studying the wind and tides really went into whether or not they’d go out.
John Sullivan: A lot of research would go into it. It wasn’t just a random thing like, “Oh, let’s go out tonight and shoot some ducks.” No, it was well thought out and planned out.
Ramsey Russell: Everything had to be perfect, all the condition had to be perfect.
John Sullivan: Exactly. And many times, they weren’t successful. You think about this happening on a regular basis, No, it was not regularly basis.
Ramsey Russell: I just find it so interesting that, it was prohibited 75 years preceding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act on Chesapeake Bay. I’m sure it continued. It was then prohibited nationwide in 1918 with the first Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Yet it continues to be legal in the United Kingdom. That’s crazy that it still existing.
John Sullivan: In my trips to Essex and on the coast of England, seeing those punts sitting up on the shore, I want to bring one home with me every time I’m over there. I’ve brought a few things home with me, but never a boat.
Ramsey Russell: Have you ever pulled the trigger on a punt gun?
John Sullivan: No.
Ramsey Russell: I hope to do it next month. Why the battery versus the punt? The battery is like three barrels out in the front that, when you pull the trigger pull the string, they all go off at one time, versus the great big old punt gun that we all know, just an arm-sized barrel sticking out, bolted down.
John Sullivan: I think you’d have a wider, well, I know for a fact you’d have a wider range with that battery gun because of the distance between the barrels. You’re going to have a wider spread of shot out there.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, wider. I am sure probably the battery was just somebody’s invention after the punt gun came along. They were like, “Hey, let’s try this, let’s try a wider pattern.”
John Sullivan: Certainly, just experimenting.
Ramsey Russell: How much shot was coming out of those punt guns, would you guess, per trigger pull?

John Sullivan: I honestly don’t know the exact number of ounces, but I’ve read it in many publications, how many ounces it would be. It would be a lot of shot, a lot of powder.

Ramsey Russell: It really wasn’t a standard to them. When I look around your collection, like you’ve got the one that’s got the knobs on the side and triggers. It looked like a massive side-by-side shotgun, and you pull the triggers in it, and it was roped down to the boat. And then other ones look like they were bolted down or assembled onto the boat. Some of them have triggers, some of them have strings. It is crazy.

John Sullivan: Many times they would have a sandbag underneath them, you know, and it would always drive the boat. The punt gun would always push the boat back in the water distance when it would fire because it’s like a cannon. And not necessarily the safest adventure out there on the Susquehanna Flats because something could always go wrong.

Ramsey Russell: “The Migratory Bird Treaty Act didn’t stop Chesapeake’s outlaw gunners. They hunted because they had to, and their stories are etched into every decoy.”

Ramsey Russell: And then he was showing me another one you had bought. It looked like a piece of massive drill stem, a pipe. And it was threaded on the back and had a massive cartridge.

John Sullivan: It looks like an artillery piece, doesn’t it?

Ramsey Russell: It looks like something more like artillery than a firearm. And how old would that have been?

John Sullivan: Well, that came from England, so it could be more contemporary than some of the other pieces. You know, I think it’s after 1900, probably in the 1920s.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John Sullivan: And it’s heavy as lead. I mean, it’s a heavy piece. The barrel on that is near a quarter of an inch thick to fire that much pattern shot at one time.

Ramsey Russell: And when we look around. Okay, so we were talking about the punt guns and the batteries, but now let’s talk more about something that resembles a shotgun because you’ve got a lot of side-by-sides around here. What are the gauges typically? I saw four gauges, I saw eight gauges. Were there anything bigger than a four gauge, two gauge?

John Sullivan: I have one two-gauge punt gun that was English-made, but it’s a real early English piece. You know, it’s Civil War vintage probably. And some of the muzzleloaders I have made in Baltimore by Alexander McComas. They are six bore.

Ramsey Russell: Six bore, Unbelievable. So I noticed above you, one of the centerpieces of this room is a very familiar punt gun. I would say for those of you all listening, I would describe this punt gun as being 12 feet long, maybe longer. The barrels are as big around as my arm. The stock looks like a piece of tree. But I recognize this. I’ve seen it in photos with two men holding it standing up. And I’ve seen it on the cover of a magazine. What’s the history and origin of this particular punt gun?

John Sullivan: “A true Chesapeake decoy tells a story of the bay’s waters and the hands that shaped it. Every chip and carve has purpose.”

John Sullivan: I was extremely fortunate with the purchase of that gun. I had no idea what I was getting other than it was a punt gun. I hadn’t seen a picture of it, but I knew it had been sold over Sloan’s auction company, Alexandria, Virginia. And the consigner to the auction was the widow of a gentleman that had worked for the Department of the Interior. And sometime in the 1940s, that gun, which had been in custody of the Department of Interior, they remodeled their offices and they didn’t need to store that gun anymore. And if you look in Harry Walsh’s book, The Outlaw Gunner, there’s a famous photograph taken in the interior of the Department of Interior. A room in there and there’s, I think three or four punt guns standing up. And there’s one punt gun that’s too tall. It would poke into the ceiling. So it’s leaning on its side. And if you look at the ironwork on that punt gun up there, you can see that exact ironwork in that photograph. And the same receiver, the trigger mechanism, which is a Harper’s Ferry lock and trigger. The original had blown out at one point, but it’s photographed and appeared in that book.

Ramsey Russell: What is the stock made out of it? It looks to me to be like a piece of wood, like an oak tree or something. They just carved and whittled it down.

John Sullivan: Nicely shaved form piece of oak to make this stock.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly what it looks like. And I’m assuming that to bolt it down, how would they have attached this to the front of a boat.

John Sullivan: Strapped it down with rope and had the stock resting on a sandbag. It’s a two-man effort just to carry that gun from point A to point B.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. How much do you think it weighs?

John Sullivan: It weighs probably 150 pounds, I’d guess.

Ramsey Russell: And if it were in possession of the Department of Interior, chances are it was confiscated.

John Sullivan: It had been confiscated, yes.

Ramsey Russell: And any idea when it was confiscated?

John Sullivan: I think 1918, approximately.

Ramsey Russell: Oh that year, wow, unbelievable. What a great piece of history. Oh, let’s talk about decoys for a little bit. And you know, the thing that always interests me about decoys is like, I’ve been to Illinois, it’s got a great decoy history. I’ve been to Louisiana and reviewed old historic Louisiana decoys and of course, here in the Chesapeake Bay. And I feel like even though as a layman, especially a layman compared to someone like yourself, I feel like I could be anywhere and see a decoy and go, that’s definitely Chesapeake Bay. Even though there’s some subtle differences to the shapes and the sizes and the head poses that various and sundry carvers throughout history have done, I still feel like they’ve got a very distinct colloquial type pattern to them. Was that fair enough to say?

John Sullivan: “Carvers like the Wards evolved their styles, adding mandibles and unique neck curves. It wasn’t just art—it was competition among craftsmen.”

John Sullivan: Very fair to say. You know, I had been purchasing these decoys for a number of years and collecting them, and I was doing a decoy show. When I say I’d do a show, I’d go in with a half a dozen pieces maybe, and hopefully keep those half a dozen pieces and add another half a dozen pieces that I found at the show. But I was doing his show up in Long Island near Stony Brook, and all these dealers from up there would come up to me and say, well, how do you know one of these decoys from another? They all look exactly the same. They all have the same shape, these round bottoms. And, yeah, they do have a similarity. And there were two or three carvers, early carvers that originated this style, and the Holly family or Dick Hallett, an early, early carver from Havre de Grace, and across on the other side of the Susquehanna in Cecil County, John B. Graham or Benjamin Dye. And those styles evolved. One of the only subtle differences is the Cecil County decoys typically had a paddle tail that came from the middle of the back, as you’d go at it, formed like a little paddle, whereas on the Havre de Grace side for some reason, the tail kicked up. There’s a little rise, a little gentle rise to that tail, and from a distance, they’re going to look the same. And when you get in close and you pick them up, all of a sudden you see, well, these tails are different. And then you see, perhaps on the Cecil County side of the Susquehanna Flats, that there’s a more distinct shelf for the neck to rest on those decoys. So they do, although very similar, there are these subtle differences that almost have to be in your hand to detect that difference. But there’s a great similarity and just subtle little differences. When I said earlier in this conversation, I mentioned these miniatures because the carver could do it. They had that talent. Why don’t we do this just a little better than this carver down the road. And so you’ll find a carver from each side of the Susquehanna Flats that might add a mandible to the carving. They might put a subtle curve underneath the bill of that carving or a little higher shelf, in those Subtle differences, a higher neck. Of course, they became very popular to have a higher neck decoy.

Ramsey Russell: Was there a difference? When you look on, you talked about those two sides of the bay. Was there a difference in the water type or how they were hunting or deploying those decoys?

John Sullivan: No, I think the water would have been the same. And the way they were hunting it, just the way that style evolved. I’m holding here in my hand a little decoy made by John Graham. This is a little ruddy duck. It has a paddle tail that comes out from the middle of the back. It has a shelf that rises up just a little bit more than an eighth of an inch. But it’s a ruddy duck, and it wears two wonderful brands on the underside. One is from a gunning club on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland. The St. Peter’s Club brand is on this. And then also on the bottom of it are carved initials, W for William Williams, who gunned at the Carroll’s Island Ducking Club. At some point in time, this little ruddy duck became a canvasback because someone took the weight off the bottom. They flattened the bottom to set on the shelf, and they painted over the ruddy duck paint and put this wonderful decorative feathering of a canvasback. You know, the black breast and the canvas on the back and a nice paint pattern on it, just to set it on the shelf because they could. The decoy also wears carved mandibles here that have a decorative eye that almost looks, it’s not like a round eye that most decoys have. It looks like a human eye, you know, the slope to it. But just a wonderful little thing and something that I enjoy every day. I can pick it up anytime I want to. And it just takes me back to think of where this decoy traveled to and how it ended up on someone’s mantelpiece and now ends up sitting behind me on this shelf.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. Who would you say? Is there a carver in particular that defined Chesapeake Bay decoy styles? Was there one carver? Can you trace it back to one carver that this is the grand father, this guy set the tone, set the style for Chesapeake Bay decoys?

John Sullivan: Well, it’s going to vary as you go down the Chesapeake Bay, but certainly in the Havre de Grace, Susquehanna Flats area, it will be the Holly family that created this, the upswept tail and the shape, this round shape of the body. So it would ride well on the Susquehanna Flats. And that style left Havre de Grace and moved in through Kent County and an area called Rock Hall. The style is still there, but with different carvers. But when you get further down the bay into Dorchester County, you’re going to see many decoys with a flat bottom and not the rounded bottom, particularly in lower Dorchester County and into Somerset County, into the Crisfield area, where the famous Ward brothers made all their decoys with a flat bottom. Very different than the decoys made and used on the Susquehanna Flats due to the nature of the water down there and the water on the flats.

Ramsey Russell: Do you have a favorite carver?

John Sullivan: John B. Graham from Cecil County, Benjamin Dyer from Cecil County, and the Holly family from the city of Havre de Grace. As I sit here looking up on a corner cupboard, I have a decoy carved by a gentleman named Al Bell. And I’m rather proud of the fact that his decoys had been referred to as “family of the Cockies” that were on Kent Island. Through research and cooperation with the Maryland Historical Society, I found a letter there about a swan they had in their collection that the carver was Al Bell. Written to a good friend of mine, C.A. Porter Hopkins, who was working at the Historical Society when the swan decoy was given to them. And it let me tie the family of Al Bell to this group of decoys that had formerly been called Cockies. Decoy Magazine published an article on Al Bell.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. You mentioned before we recorded, you know, I was introduced to you by my buddy Jeff Palayo. And Jeff, I remember, used to himself be involved in these collectibles over in this neck of the woods. And I know Jeff’s a listener, so I wanted to give him a shout-out. What was that you said before we recorded, that you kind of missed Jeff being over in this neck of the woods because he was such a great student of this collectible thing? What makes a good student of collecting this kind of history?

John Sullivan: In Jeff’s case, he developed a close personal relationship with a late friend of mine, Henry A. Fleckenstein Jr. from Cambridge, Maryland. And he would listen to everything that I said to him and everything that Henry said to him. And he had a great memory that he could lock in on what we told him. And then maybe he’d see some feature in one of these decoys that we hadn’t noticed, and he’d come back to us. Or he would see a similarity in a carving between, you know, two different species by two different carvers and see the similarities and how that evolved. He was a great student, and he could teach a lot of people. I regret the fact that he left Maryland because he developed a sharp mind and he developed a great collection in a short period of time.

Ramsey Russell: He did. But you know, what I love about Jeff is beyond the antiquities and the collectibles. It’s almost like he still practices the lifestyle that, to me, a lot of these collections represent. You know, Jeff moved out to North Dakota, where he trains gun dogs and duck hunts. In a country absolutely blessed, a part of the world blessed with lots of puddle ducks and geese. Jeff doesn’t do that. Jeff hunts divers. Jeff targets divers. And he still uses probably not some of the decoys I’m looking at around here, but he still uses the real deal, old-school decoys. He soaks them, as he calls it. He puts those decoys out from various and sundry other contemporary carvers, and he soaks them, and they’re gunning decoys still. And that’s, boy, I tell you what, you know, and that’s something else about a lot of the decoys around your collection. Some of them, like some of the decorative ones you were talking about, because they could carve them, they did. But most of the decoys were carved to soak on the water and to lure wild ducks into range. And what do you think some of these carvers would think today? They were selling their decoys for one or two or three dollars to see what their decoys are fetching as folk art today?

John Sullivan: Probably they wouldn’t believe it’s actually happened. Something they made as something to be used, a tool to be used, and now it becomes a decorative item on someone’s shelf. But they must have known that was going to happen at some point with the carving of these wonderful miniatures they were doing. I mentioned earlier that pair of Hollies that were a wedding present, they knew that at some point what they made was going to end up inside instead of out on the water. They had to realize that was happening, or they wouldn’t have made those decorative pieces.

Ramsey Russell: I still hear stories. I’m asking as well as leading up to just telling the story. I still hear stories of, gosh, over in Chestertown, Maryland, not far from here, one of the men that introduced me to cork decoys showed me some that he and his dad had bought. He’s about my age, so he’d have been a teenager, and they paid five or ten dollars apiece. He can remember in the 1970s, the advent of plastic decoys. He can remember his dad and camp members standing around a campfire, stringing up these new-fangled, light, and waterproof plastic decoys, and feeding the fire with their old wooden decoys. And I still hear of just stuff like that being pitched into the fire. I was talking to somebody recently who just, oh boy, he wishes he had his dad and granddad’s old decoys. And they probably just burned them for fire stovewood.

John Sullivan: I’ve heard that many times, and I hope it wasn’t a regular occurrence, but it could have been.

Ramsey Russell: Well, somebody told me the story one time about Elmer Cromwell, who I believe was Massachusetts.

John Sullivan: Crowell, Elmer Crowell.

Ramsey Russell: Crowell. Crowell. But anyway, somebody told me that, someone had bought his home. And they just described it as, I’m basing this on memory, just one of the most. If I’m not mistaken, his decoys have sold at auction for some of the record prices. And yet they just described the home buyer’s wife going out to this little old shop and just started pitching, it was just full of sawdust and cobwebs and all kinds of bric-a-brac, lumber, and heads and stuff, and she just started pitching it in the trash before someone caught wind of it and went by there and stopped her, and ended up putting what hadn’t been thrown away or destroyed into a collection. They explained to her that this was worth gazillions of dollars she’d thrown away. But it was too late. The trash had already come and hauled it off. What jarred my memory was looking up. You told me a story when I got here about a pair of what looked like goose decoys but painted as swan decoys. You’ve got them up here around these three shorebirds. What are the origins of them? You saved them from ending up in a rubbish pile.

John Sullivan: Those decoys were one on either side of a porch post, the type of porch post you’d go up like six steps onto the porch, and there’d be a column on each side, a low column. They were on either side of that. I saw them on this house exactly two miles from where we’re sitting today. I saw them on the porch of that house 40 years ago, and for 40 years, I tried to buy them. I happened to show up one day, and a yard sale was going on. I asked about these two decoys sitting there. “No, they’re not for sale. They’re not for sale.” I didn’t stop because I knew some other things were being sold out of the house. Finally, I got him, I got the right amount of money on the right day. They’re unknown. The body is very much in the form of a Holly decoy from Haverty Grace, and the head is very much like the form of a Graham from Cecil County. But I cherish them a lot because I knew where they were. They had been used by the gentleman I bought them from his grandfather. He used them on the Susquehanna Flats. Then he retired them, painted them white, and made them part of a decorative item going into the house. So I knew right where they were for a long time. I knew how they’d been used. I knew the family that had them. And now they’re here, sitting on my shelf instead of on a porch post. I saved them for posterity because the house came down completely. Well, it came down, was remodeled, and rebuilt in the same place with a much different configuration on the porch. But just knowing where they were for so long and the effort I put into getting them, that’s part of the story. When we talked about burning decoys up, there’s an interesting story from Crisfield, Maryland, where the famous Ward brothers were. One of their neighbors, a gentleman named Lloyd Tyler, had the reputation as the “poor man’s decoy maker.” What he would do was get rejected bodies, bodies that weren’t good enough for the Wards to use. He’d get wood out of their scrap pile and make decoys. Now his decoys are quite valuable, made out of the scrap lumber the Wards wouldn’t use. Lloyd Tyler has a great reputation as a folk artist.

Ramsey Russell: Why were the Wards so famous? I mean, I see their decoys, and they’re beautiful, but they don’t, to my layman’s eye, just stick out as like, okay, better than this one or better than that one. But why are they so famous?

John Sullivan: They participated in some of the earliest decoy shows, and they transitioned from making working decoys into being some of the earliest decorative decoy carvers in the country. They made decorative orders and various styles. The tradition further up the bay was to stick with one style and do this repetitive style over and over again. The Wards’ style evolved. They had one called the “Fat Jaw,” with big puffy cheeks that almost look like a cartoon when you look at the duck. And then a knothead, a canvasback decoy with an unusual configuration of the head. They were famous for something called an ice groove on the back of some of their ducks. It was part of their style. But whether it was good or bad, I think the jury is still out on that. Their popularity comes from the variety and the great artistic talent they brought to that variety of styles.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Unbelievable. You know, I’m staying down by Eastern Maryland, and I wasn’t here in time for the Waterfowl Festival. I love going to it. I actually heard Harry Walsh was one of the founders of that event. Did you know Harry Walsh?

John Sullivan: Yes, I knew Harry, and I know his son Joe.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

John Sullivan: Many of the things in Harry’s original collection went to various museums.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

John Sullivan: And there’s currently a display going on at the Talbot County Historical Society in Easton of many of the objects from the Harry Walsh collection that were given to museums. They’ve gathered a group of those together.

Ramsey Russell: Have you got any good Harry Walsh stories?

John Sullivan: No.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. I actually had Joe on here in a previous podcast, and he had some good stories. He’s a very interesting person himself. They’ve now republished The Outlaw Gunner, and I think just, gosh, 30 years ago, I stumbled across that book, and I think it really captivated me into this era we’re talking about. He did a good job describing a lot of the practices we’re talking about and some of the artifacts, including this gun and some other stuff. But, you know, I was shocked. I knew there was a waterman or waterfowl exhibit at one of the maritime museums down there. I looked it up because I wanted to go by and see it. And they got on the webpage, it was dismantled or discontinued in April of ’24. Too little, too late. I was here too late to really go by that museum and see whatever they had on display that sounded so good. What do you think ever happened to all that stuff?

John Sullivan: It’s in storage.

Ramsey Russell: There ain’t no story to tell in storage.

John Sullivan: No, unfortunately, I was on the initial building committee for that museum, and they were going to redo the waterfowling building. But they went in a different direction. They built a new building called the Welcome Center. They have a number of their small crafts, some wonderful early boats, displayed in there. And they have a large vacant room which will, at some point, be their waterfowl room.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. They’ll bring it back.

John Sullivan: And my understanding is that opening would be in January of 2026. And hopefully, I’ll be a part of that when it happens.

Ramsey Russell: Good. Tell me about this drawing, this painting hanging over here on this wall. You told me about it earlier.

John Sullivan: That painting is comparable to the very best decoy in my mind because it was painted by James T. Holley, one of the originators of the Haverty Grace school of decoy carving. And it was in the family, the Holley family, up until the time it came into my custody. It shows two hunters in a sink box, a two-man sink box. Very unusual configuration for a sink box to have two men side by side shooting. You had to be pretty careful, I would think. But there’s hundreds of decoys surrounding that sink box in the painting, and a number of canvasbacks overhead. It’s painted, you know, it was a working man’s painting. I mean, he was a great artist, a folk artist for his time. But the length of time to paint that many ducks with the detail that is in each one of those little images, I would say they’re about a half-inch long in the painting, but there’s hundreds of them. And when I took it out of the frame to make sure it had the proper glass and the proper acid-free mounting behind it, it’s painted on the type of paper that would be used in a butcher shop or a grocery store in the early 1900s. It’s a piece of brown paper used to wrap someone’s groceries or a piece of meat that would be cut in the butcher shop. That’s the paper that they used. But the family kept it and cherished it up until it came into my custody. And I’m extremely fortunate to have it.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think he intended it for it to be framed if it was just done on something like butcher paper, or do you think he was just entertaining himself?

John Sullivan: I think it was probably both. But I think that’s the frame that the family had it in all those years. And at some point, the family had smaller versions of that printed and actually sold them for like 50 cents apiece around the city of Haverty Grace. I have a couple of those myself, but that’s the original in there. And it’s as important as any decoy in the house or maybe more important.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the most unusual artifacts you’ve stumbled across in all your years of collecting Chesapeake Bay antiquities?

John Sullivan: Well, I showed you earlier that large goose painted as a swan. That’s a preener.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

John Sullivan: Preeners are probably as rare as any decoy from the region where you have the neck extending back and the bill of the decoy actually touching the back of the decoy where it would be sleeping or preening its feathers. And that particular decoy showed up at the Haverty Grace decoy show a few years ago. And I saw the dealer carry it in. I saw him put it under his table, leaving it in the box it was in it, partially covered with a cloth. And I could see the suggestion of that form just with the cloth over it. And then I went over and sat down next to the dealer and I said, what’s this decoy under the table? “Oh, just something I brought along to show some people. It’s not really for sale.” And I said, what’s the price on it? “Not for sale. Oh, no, it’s not for sale.” I said, well, let me just have a quick look at it. And I took a very quick look. I made a price for the not-for-sale decoy.

Ramsey Russell: Made him a not-for-sale offer.

John Sullivan: Right. And it moved over under my table.

Ramsey Russell: What did you see that made you want to buy it?

John Sullivan: I could see that it was a preener, and I could see that it was in ancient white paint, and I could see that it had great form. And I showed it to a couple of people before I left, and they were struck with its great form. And I took a picture of it, sent it to my son, and he says, I need to see that today. You got to bring it to me to show it to me, what’s going on with it. And all I had seen when it was under the dealer’s table was just this form of its neck and the shape of this body. Now, there’s no one alive that’ll ever be able to say who made this decoy because it incorporates styles from New Jersey coast to the Susquehanna Flats and everything in between. But the fact that you look at this bird and it has a shelf here over an inch high, and this neck, this perfectly sculpted neck that comes back and carved mandibles as it touches the back of this decoy. So it’s definitely a preener or a sleeper. One or the other, we could call it both. But the form of this head, the feel of it, and forgive me for using the word sensual to describe it, but that’s the only way you can describe it. So I took it to show it to my son, and it’s never been painted anything other than a swan. Your mind will take to the fact that it’s probably the size of a goose, but I think it’s always been used as a swan, hollow carved, pinned together or screwed together as you go around the body. And it’s in the back of my Suburban the day I got it. My son looks at it and he says, let’s see the bottom of it. So he turned it over to the bottom and stamped in the bottom, branded into the bottom, is the word Whistler.

Ramsey Russell: What does that mean? We have on the bottom, Whistler.

John Sullivan: Whistler. Now, of course, everyone knew his mother, but we don’t know who Whistler was. We think it could have been the name of a gunning scow, but research tends to take us to a wealthy hunter, a wealthy sportsman out of New England that came to this region and had this one decoy made. There’s been a few others with the brand Whistler, primarily canvasbacks. But this unique piece, you know, it’s folk art is American sculpture at its best. And I wrote a story for Decoy Magazine. I wrote about this discovery of this bird, and I entitled that story “The Holy Grail” because in my opinion, this is as good as it gets.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John Sullivan: There’s a lot of new, wealthy collectors.

Ramsey Russell: It’s as good as it gets because of the art form.

John Sullivan: The art form, yes.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And you have no idea who did it?

John Sullivan: No, we don’t know who did it. It’s just a great piece of sculpture. But other than having my neck and my knee and my back X-rayed, I’ve never had a decoy X-rayed. And a lot of these new, wealthy collectors will have something X-rayed. And believe it or not, I had this decoy X-rayed. And you can see exactly how it’s constructed. You see, there’s no new modern nails or new modern screws. That’s made exactly as it presents itself sitting here to this day. And it’s a holy grail. In my opinion, it’s not going to get any better than this.

Ramsey Russell: Which side of the bay did it come from, based on that tale?

John Sullivan: You would think the Haverty Grace side. That would indicate the Haverty Grace side, but other characteristics don’t attribute it to a local carver. You know, the little business of carving this mandible in here. Why would they do that, you know, for something this size?

Ramsey Russell: Because they could.

John Sullivan: Because they could. Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Because they could. What does all of these decoys and that era and the guns and the boats, what do they represent to you personally? What does this collection represent to you personally?

John Sullivan: My lifetime avocation. That’s something I’ve done, you know, as long as I can remember now, I have other recollections before the age of 13. And I can go back to those two decoys that sat on the family’s hearth that were always there from the time I could recognize anything. You know, the pair of decoys that were given to my father. You know, it’s my avocation. It’s my life, and I love every bit of it. I live with these things, as you can see. You know, there’s no place that I sit in this house from the time I wake up in the morning that I look, that I don’t enjoy the view of what I see, of what I’ve accumulated in my lifetime.

Ramsey Russell: What have you learned about people, about the cultural significance of this area? What has your lifetime avocation taught you about people, about cultures, or something about yourself?

John Sullivan: I think more than anything, I’ve learned from my associations in this field, in this avocation, the willingness of people to share, to share their stories, to share their life with me, and to share the appreciation that I have for the things that they have collected. One of my most recent trips was to a gentleman I bought a decoy from 40 years ago. He called me up recently, and he had some decoys for sale. I went to see him, and they were all plastic. They were all Styrofoam. Sitting in his living room were two wooden canvasbacks. They came home with me that day. And those decoys tell a story. They were used in Havre de Grace by John Pusey and his father, Joel Pusey, and they were repainted by Robert McGaw from Havre de Grace. They were re-headed by Bob McGaw. And they’re much older decoys. McGaw died in 1958, but these decoys were made probably in 1880. Just the fact that I had developed that relationship with this man 40-some years ago when I bought two other wooden geese from him, the fact that he calls me up, and he’s 92 years old, and he had these decoys, initially the plastic and Styrofoam ones that he wanted to sell. But when my interest turned to those wooden ones, he was immediately there sharing the story with me. And the story is of his life because he’s been a waterfowler, you know, his entire lifetime. So he shares stories with me. And that heritage from this region is so dear to me.

Ramsey Russell: You picked up another miniature. What’s the story on that?

John Sullivan: This is another one of these cases, “because he could.” It’s a teal form, but it’s painted as a canvasback. It’s been rigged and used as a working decoy. Why would he do that? It has carved mandibles, it has carved eyes, it’s got carved nostrils.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s tiny. It looks like a novelty.

John Sullivan: Right, it does look like a novelty, but it was, you know, he did it because he was having fun that day. And he probably had this teal body, or even small for a teal body. But it has fabulous form and has fabulous paint. The wings painted on it have taken on a bluish hue now. It’s just a great little piece of folk art. And I can sit it next to this holy grail. And I think they’re both holy grails now.

Ramsey Russell: What do collections like yours represent? What value do they represent to society at large? What would you think? I mean, what would be, there’s value in this. It’s artistic value, but at the same time, it just, you know, I walk around, I look at these decoys and go, oh, they’re beautiful. It’s just, I want to put my hands on them, I want to hold them, I want to look at them. When I pick up that old decoy, I want to wonder who carved it and what was he thinking, and where was it hunted, what was killed over it? But I think there’s a greater value to some of this folk art, just to society at large.

John Sullivan: You know, the value is certainly not in my eyes. It’s not a monetary value. It’s just what you said. It’s the stories they tell, the history that they bring alive to me and people who appreciate it. You know, it’s history, and it’s our history, and it’s unique in America, that history, you know, it’s America’s. Joel Barber first said it in 1934 when he called it Americana. You know, it’s unique, from the Native Americans carving these out of bulrushes, you know, and then skinning their first bird of the day and putting it over top of those reeds to make it look exactly like the live bird. It goes back to that time, this unique American folk art that we call Americana.

Ramsey Russell: A man named Joel Barber, now that you mention it, he kind of put this folk art, these old working decoys, he kind of put it to the forefront of American consciousness as a collectible and an art, didn’t he?

John Sullivan: Yes, he did. His earliest writing in 1932, he was a New York architect, and he traveled up and down the East Coast accumulating these things. And one of the favorite expressions that he ever used is when the old captain up on Long Island says to him, “Come into my shed and look at what I have.” And he sees it in a different eye than that waterfowler saw it. He sees it with the eye of an architect, and all of a sudden he sees it as Americana, as an American contribution to folk art.

Ramsey Russell: You know, a lot of people ask. A lot of people collect a lot of things because of the collectible value, the monetary value. I asked you earlier on, how does this kind of art, how does art like this compare to the stock market in terms of an appreciable investment? So I want to kind of end on this note. A lot of people would walk through such an amassed collection and see an investment, a wealth, you know, expressed as the resale value. But you don’t have any ambition for doing that. John, you know, I asked you, well, where’s this collection? Where’s this going to be 10, 20, 30 years from now, when neither one of us is around? But it’s, where is your collection going to be?

John Sullivan: Hopefully, it’s going to be with C. John Sullivan III. But realistically, it’s exactly like that Holley painting over there. The fact that it was never for sale, or that holy grail that was not for sale. You know, some of it will get sold, if not all of it. And I announced at this group of older collectors I was with doing the artifacts exhibit last week in Easton, I said, “We’re the master recyclers.” Because you have one of these older collectors that passes and the next older collector buys it, and it just keeps recycling like that. Hopefully, my recycling will be done, first of all, within the family.

Ramsey Russell: You know, that’s where it should be, in the family. Now, granted, waterfowl taxidermy is a lot different than art, which is what a lot of this has become. And generally speaking, I’m just painting with a broad brush here. A lot of wives have different ideas of what they want, their house and their home to look like. You must have had a very tolerant wife. I mean, she must have been fully on board with this because your entire home, it’s just an immersive museum. Your wife must have been very, very supportive, like my own.

John Sullivan: She was very supportive, as is my partner today, until the other day when we started looking for a particular bluebill. And after we moved about 100 and we didn’t find the right one, she says, “That’s enough of those.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s enough of this. John, thank you very much for welcoming me into your home. Thank you for the tour and thank you for the discussion. It’s a fascinating topic, and I don’t know why or I feel like nowhere outside of Chesapeake Bay. I mean, there’s a lot of history and culture in California. There’s a lot of history and culture in the Deep South, particularly Louisiana. There’s a lot of history and culture in the Upper Mississippi River around Illinois. But I just never feel like any of those regions more embodied this snapshot of the good old days of America waterfowling, or the bad old days, depending on how you look at it, when you start thinking about these punt guns and stuff like the Chesapeake Bay. To me, it is the absolute cradle of American waterfowling.

John Sullivan: Thank you. I agree with you, Ramsey. It’s our culture.

Ramsey Russell: It is. And thank you very much, John. I’ve appreciated it. Folks, thank you all for listening this episode of Mojo Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, a deep dive into Chesapeake Bay decoys and waterfowl hunting culture and punt guns and all that good stuff. You all have been listening to my buddy, Mr. John Sullivan. See you next.