This is a gentleman’s Whitehall.” That’s how Steve Holt describes the Shaw & Tenney Whitehall, a 17' 9" recreational rowboat based on a legendary 19th-century working type. Holt is proprietor of Shaw & Tenney, the 150-year-old, Orono, Maine–based maker of wooden oars and paddles. The company itself is something of a commercial legend for its longstanding success in its small niche, and this Whitehall, a modern wooden version, is Shaw & Tenney’s first boat offering in all of those years.The Whitehall pulling boat is widely believed to have originated in New York and been named for Whitehall Street in that city, though the great small-craft historian John Gardner cast some doubt on that supposition in his book, Building Classic Small Craft, Volume 1. He said the boat’s origins were “vague and shadowy,” and suggested that it might even have been imported from England. Regardless of the type’s roots, it was in active service in New York by the 1820s, and it spread to Boston, where it developed distinctive regional traits.“The Whitehall was not a ship’s boat, but a vehicle of harbor and coastwise transportation,” writes Gardner. “Not only were these boats the choice of crimps and boarding-house runners, but of nearly everyone else as well who required reliable and expeditious transportation about the waterfront or from one part of the harbor to another—ship chandlers, brokers, newspaper reporters, insurance agents, doctors, pilots, ships officers, port officials, and many others.

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