Archive record
- This address
- http://www.lewestown.com/lewes_history/gilbert.html
- Originally
- “Gilbert Byron — The Lewes Connection” by Hazel Brittingham (1997), from Lantern on Lewes, Lewestown Publishers — the article cited by Wikipedia's Gilbert Byron entry
- Original page
- Captures at the Internet Archive
The article below is newly written and independently sourced. It is not Mrs. Brittingham's text. Her original is at the archive link above.
Gilbert Byron's Lewes connection
Gilbert Byron (1903–1991) is remembered as the “Chesapeake Thoreau” — the poet who spent forty-five years in a hand-built cabin on a Maryland cove writing about the bay. But before the cabin, Byron was a schoolteacher, and one of the places he taught was Lewes, Delaware, where the town's bay pilots walked into his poems and stayed there.
Who was Gilbert Byron?
Gilbert Valliant Byron was born in Chestertown, Maryland on 12 July 1903 — Henry David Thoreau's birthday, a coincidence he leaned into for the rest of his life. The son of a waterman and a seamstress, he graduated from Washington College in 1923 with a degree in history and political science and went straight into teaching, a career of some thirty-three years across three states. In 1946 he left teaching and Dover, Delaware, and built himself a cabin — for $133.17, no electricity, no running water — on a cove near St. Michaels, Maryland, where he lived and wrote for forty-five years. His fourteen books and seventy-plus short stories, including the novel The Lord's Oysters (1957) and the poetry collection These Chesapeake Men (1942), are often called the largest body of writing about the Chesapeake region produced by one person. He died on 25 June 1991, and his cabin was later moved and preserved at Pickering Creek Audubon Center near Easton.
What was the Lewes connection?
Byron's teaching career took him from Maryland into Delaware — first to Dover, and to Lewes, where he taught school as a young man. Lewes gave him a subject the Chesapeake could not: the Delaware Bay pilots, whose families have guided ships past the capes since the eighteenth century and who live and operate from the town to this day. Byron wrote poems about them — “The Pilots of Lewes,” illustrated with a wood engraving by the Delmarva artist John Moll, and “The Missing Pilot” (1943), which follows a pilot trapped aboard an outbound brigantine when weather off the Overfalls makes it impossible to put him ashore, carried past the spires of Lewes town toward Calais. Both belong to his Delaware period, collected in Delaware Poems (Driftwind Press, 1943). Decades later he returned in verse: his poem “Once Upon an Anniversary” was written to mark the 350th anniversary of Lewes in 1981.
Why was his page on this website?
Because Hazel Brittingham wrote it. Her 1997 article “Gilbert Byron — The Lewes Connection,” from her Lantern on Lewes project, documented the writer's Delaware years and was published at this address by Lewestown Publishers; Wikipedia's biography of Byron cited it for years. The connection between the two writers was personal as well as scholarly: Brittingham attended the annual celebrations of Byron's work at Pickering Creek, and lent material — including a print of Moll's engraving for “The Pilots of Lewes” — to later writing about him. Two local historians of two bays, each determined that their shore's ordinary working people be written down.
Byron's manuscripts and letters are collected at Chesapeake College, and his legacy is kept by the Gilbert Byron Society, which hosts a birthday reading at Pickering Creek each October. Hazel Brittingham's own papers are at the Lewes Historical Society; see about Hazel Brittingham.
Where this comes from
- The Gilbert Byron Society, gilbertbyron.org — biography, the Delmarva career, the fourteen books.
- Baltimore Sun, obituary, June 1991 — Washington College 1923, the teaching career, the 1946 move from Dover, the $133.17 cabin.
- Cape Gazette, “Locals help celebrate the birthday of author Gilbert Byron” (2009) — the teaching career that took him to Dover and then to Lewes.
- Chestertown Spy (Dennis Forney), on “The Missing Pilot” — the Lewes pilots poems, the John Moll engraving, and Hazel Brittingham's part in preserving it.
- Hazel Brittingham, “Gilbert Byron — The Lewes Connection” (1997), archived original.