Boating history is in the name

Posted: Friday, May 4, 2012 10:00 am

“My father and I caught two CHINOOKS this weekend near Puget Island,” RICHARD MARSHALL LEATHERS IV (aka Marshall ), told the Ear. “We took a nice photo of my new son, Richard Marshall Leathers V (aka QUINT, pictured).”

History buffs will recognize that it’s an old Astoria name. “My great-grandfather (Richard Marshall Leathers) owned a boat building business in the late 1800s,” Marshall explained. “Both my grandfather (Richard Marshall Leathers II) and father (Richard Marshall Leathers III) were raised in Astoria; however I was raised in Portland.”

According to the long-winded-titled tome “Portrait and biographical record of Western Oregon, containing original sketches of many well known citizens of the past and present” (http://tinyurl.com/rmleathers), Chapman Publishing Co., 1904, LEATHERS BROTHERS’ ASTORIA SHIPYARD, “the largest shop for the building of small boats in the west,” built boats in the 11- to 90-foot range.

Quint’s great-great-grandfather was said to be a “veteran craftsman (who) is known all along the ocean front from the northernmost habitable wilds of Alaska to the sunny mesas of Mexico, for no western builder has turned out so many pleasure launches, fishing-boats, or so many row and duck-boats.”

A forward-thinking gentleman, “he constructed his new shop in the fall of 1902, and has fitted it with electric power and the most modern innovations known to boat-building.” He “evolves from his fertile brain some of the most artistic and delightful models which now plow the waters of the Pacific and Arctic oceans.”

— Elleda Wilson

Reprinted with the permission of The Daily Astorian of Astoria, Oregon