How Grand Bank made the 'Grandy dory' a Newfoundland icon

During the late 1800s and all of the 1900s, the small boat of choice along the south and southwest coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador was the dory. This versatile little craft was used for inshore fishing, carried on the decks of schooners to fish from on our offshore banks, and a means of transportation connecting many of our smaller isolated communities and also often filled the role as lifeboats on larger vessels.

Simeon Lowell of Salisbury Point, Mass., is credited with inventing the dory in 1793. Over the ensuing decades these small, shallow-draft flat bottom boats, measuring five to seven metres long, became so popular and were in such demand for fishing along the eastern seaboard that eventually "dory factories," where they were mass-produced, were established.

When the more than 450 vessels of the New England fishing fleet were looking for newer and richer fishing areas in the 1860s, they expanded their fishing efforts farther offshore to the Scotian Banks and the Grand Banks. According to Gloucester author and historian John N. Morris, "it was on the more distant fishing grounds, the Western and the Grand Banks, that ground-trawl dory fishing first gained its foothold, and once it started it overspread the fleet by the end of the decade."

This led to the dory being modified by making the thwarts, or rower seats, removable, so they could be nestled — stacked up to six deep — and carried on the deck of the schooner to and from the offshore grounds.

Around the same time schooners from Nova Scotia also took advantage of the lucrative fishing on our offshore banks followed by our own fishermen in 1891, led by Samuel Harris and at least 16 other schooner owners from Grand Bank.

The increasing demand soon led to dory factories being set up in our neck of the woods: at Lunenburg and Shelburne in Nova Scotia, as well as at Bay of Islands, St. John's, Grand Bank, Monkstown and Lamaline in Newfoundland and on the nearby French Islands of St-Pierre-Miquelon.

As dory building developed in other countries,  there were attempts to improve the original Lowell design did occur but basically over the ensuing 200 years no major changes were made to the overall style of the first dory. Some builders did depart from the original Lowell design by, for example, raising the height of the bow or changing the slope of the stern.

Local dory builders of note included brothers John and Henry Monk of Monkstown, Placentia Bay — builders of their own designed dory for some 60 years — James Tuff of Lamaline and Stephen Leonard Grandy of Grand Bank.

"The sturdy Monk dory was a great favourite with fishing skippers and dorymen who fished in their small 'western boats' off Cape St. Mary's , the Virgin Rocks and even out on the far flung Grand Banks," according to Otto Kelland, in his 1984 book Dories and Dorymen.

Stephen Leonard Grandy was born in 1884 in Garnish, where shipbuilding was the major employer from the late 1800s until the 1940s. While honing his carpentry skills as a young man, he moved to the larger nearby town of Grand Bank, which offered more employment opportunities.

Eli Harris, brother of merchant Samuel Harris, was an experienced carpenter/shipbuilder who also operated a dory  factory at Grand Bank from 1905 to 1928, according to historian/writer Randell Pope, and it was there that Grandy found employment around 1918.

When Eli Harris retired, Grandy took over the dory building and schooner repair business, serving the needs of the Samuel Harris business, which operated a large fleet of offshore fishing and foreign going vessels.

In the 1930s, following the bankruptcy of the Harris empire, Grandy developed a mutually beneficial working relationship with another Grand Bank fishing firm, G&A Buffett Ltd., which marketed his Grandy-built dories all along the south coast.

Over the years Grandy had designed a dory that he felt better suited the Newfoundland fishery, weather and ocean conditions. He raised the bow height, making the craft more seaworthy. The stem was truncated, making it safer to offload over the side of the schooner while at sea. He used only grown timbers, which were much stronger than the jointed timbers commonly used by other builders.