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HOME > HISTORY INTRODUCTION > CHAPTER 1 > CHAPTER 2 > CHAPTER 3 > CHAPTER 4 > A NEW WAY > MARY BUTLER DAVIES
Time and the Tide
A Centennial History of the Vane Brothers Company
by Mary Butler Davies
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Introduction
This is the story of four generations of men whose bloodlines originate on the farms and waterways of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and who first came to Baltimore under the sails of the great schooners of the Chesapeake Bay. Driven by entrepreneurial energies and keen business instincts, these first schoonermen—the Vanes—established a small ship chandlery in Fell’s Point in 1898. Today, one hundred years later, the Vane Brothers Company complex sweeps across three piers in Baltimore’s Canton waterfront district.
The story begins with Captain William Burke Vane, known as "Burke," and his brother, Captain Allen P. Vane, who together owned, sailed, and supplied baycraft for forty years. By the 1920s brothers Claude Venables and Charles Fletcher Hughes, thought to be cousins of the Vanes, had come from the Eastern Shore to work in the chandlery on East Pratt Street. The Vanes had withstood the economic changes brought to the maritime trades by WWI and WWII. Together the brothers Vane and Hughes braced themselves for changes from schooner to power.
Charles F. Hughes Jr., son of Charles Sr., came to Vane Brothers in 1951. He takes great pride in his forty-eight-year association with the company. Semi-retired now, he recalls playing as a child at the chandlery, and on the decks of the great sailing ships, most especially the elegant schooner Doris Hamlin. Playing at the chandlery was a childhood pastime then, not a passion. But today, looking back, he says, "I realize that my heart had become fully entwined with the waterfront community and the people who worked beside me those many years."
C. Duff Hughes, son of Charles Jr., joined his father in 1980. Since that time the company has expanded its services and operations to the ports of Philadelphia and Norfolk. The old chandlery is no longer in place on the piers of Canton; instead, ten Vane tugboats and thirty barges slide in and out of the waterways as far north as New York and as far south as the Carolinas, and often in the rivers of Maryland's Eastern Shore where the story began a century ago.
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