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In the late '20s the shipment of petroleum products began to increase. Big storage tanks and oil distribution yards were built at various points on the navigable rivers and motorized oil tankers were used to bring the petroleumm products to these distribution points. Three big oil yards were constructed along the Choptank in West Denton and these became distribution points for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later divided into several companies including Exxon, American Oil Company (Amoco), and Sun Oil Company (Sunoco). I became acquainted with the men in charge of these oil companies and found opportunities to work in the yards....
For the first part of the twentieth century many of the roads on the Eastern Shore were top dressed with oyster shells. When spread on the road surface several inches thick, they would eventually become mashed into small pieces and thus form a hard surface on what would otherwise have been a sandy or muddy road. Occasionally, boatloads of oyster shells would be brought up river to be spread on the roads by the county employees.
It was a rare occasion, but always interesting, when a pile driver came to the river to engage in a pile driving job. This would happen around Denton at lease once in every two or three years. A pile driver was a barge with a derrick mounted at one end. A piling (which was a large tree that had been processed and waterproofed) would be placed into the derrick and driven into the river bottom by means of a heavy iron weight which operated up and down a track within the derrick. The weight was lifted with a windlass and allowed to fall by gravity, thus pounding the piling blow by blow into the river bottom. Later, a diesel-driven hammer was substituted for the iron weight.
Wharves and piers were built on pilings, drawbridge passageways were buffered on each side and river banks were shored up and reinforced with pilings and logs. Pilings were also used as pillars upon which to build warehouses along the river banks. At several places along a wharf and even along river bank pilings were driven and allowed to extend from three to six feet above the surface of the wharf or river bank for use in tying up all kinds of boats.
The process of contracting for a pile driver to place a number of pilings was an expensive one and therefore used only on occasions when the job was large enough to justify the expense. If only one or two pilings needed to be driven or replaced, this job would usually have to wait until a driver was brought in to do a larger job. A pile driver carried its own crew, so there was no employment for local people - just a form of entertainment for those who had time to watch.
Barges were sometimes towed up the river for transporting materials that were difficult to move in the holds of a sailing vessel, such as oyster shell or stone. My most memorable occasion involving a barge occurred when a very large one loaded with stone sank shortly after it had been tied up along the river bank and open lot in front of our house. The stone was to be used in building a concrete road near Denton.
It was later determined that under the barge, four or five feet from the river bank, there was a broken off piling, previously not known to be there. It apparently had not been a hazard to other boats, but the broad bottom of the barge, low in the water, could not miss it. The barge had been tied up at high tide and had just barely eased over the top of the submerged piling. As the tide went out the barge dropped lower into the water and came to rest upon the top of the piling. The weight of the stone caused the bottom of the barge to yield to the broken-off piling creating a hole that soon allowed the water to rush in and sink the barge.
Fortunately, the river was somewhat shallow along this bank and the barge was not completely submerged. It took some intelligence and ingenuity, however, to figure out how to recover the stone from underwater and to eventually float and save the barge. The whole process took several weeks. Mules and leveling pans like they used in that day to move and level soil were used. The work was done mostly at low tide when most of the stone was visible and could be dragged from the deck of the barge. Men would drag the pans from the river bank onto the deck of the barge, wade into the water, sometimes waist deep, and guide the pans so that they would self-load as the mules drug them back to the land.
Today any number of soil moving machines could make short work of the whole process. Eventually, enough rock was removed so that the bottom of the barge came off of the submerged piling far enough that it could be patched. Then the remaining water was pumped out and the barge salvaged. Local residents never forgot the location of that submerged piling and made it a point to warn other captains seeking to tie up at that point.
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