The Journal · On the Mark
The mark on the chest pocket of your jacket is a small thing. It is also a piece of working sporting history, drawn from a specific bird, carved by a specific pair of hands, on a specific island, more than a hundred years ago. There is a story behind that mark. This is it.
A Decoy, Not a Duck
First, a small correction. The bird on the DECOY logo is not a duck. It is a decoy. The difference matters. A duck is wild. A decoy is something a man made with his hands to bring the wild thing close enough to hunt. Every line of the silhouette, the rounded chest, the gentle slope of the neck-base into the body, the straight bill, comes from a wooden object that was carved to do a job in the water.
That distinction is the whole brand in miniature. The duck is the reason for everything. The decoy is the way the sportsman honors it, by sitting in the cold long before sunrise with a spread of his own hand-made birds in the water in front of him. We are a brand built on that gesture. The carved bird stands in for the wild one.
So how did we come to have a simple canvasback decoy represent our entire brand? Just because it looks cool, you might say, and you are right, it does look really cool. But there is a lot more history behind it than just looking cool. That history begins on a small island with a quirky story over a hundred years ago.
Knotts Island, North Carolina: Where the Story Begins
Knotts Island sits at the extreme northeastern corner of North Carolina. Currituck Sound lies to the west and south, the North Landing River to the east, and the Virginia state line cuts across the top. To get there from the North Carolina mainland, you take a state ferry. To get there from Virginia Beach, you drive. The geography gives the island a quiet kind of remoteness, even today.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this corner of the coast was one of the great waterfowl flyways on the East Coast. The Old Currituck Inlet had closed in 1828, and the sound turned from salt to fresh. Grass beds spread across the shallows. Canvasbacks, redheads, and ruddy ducks arrived in numbers that observers of the period described as blackening the sky. The hunting was extraordinary. So was the carving that came out of it.
The Dudley Brothers and the Knotts Island Carving Tradition
In the 1890s, two twin brothers named Lee and Lem Dudley were trapping and market-gunning for a living on Knotts Island. Around 1892 they started carving decoys for their own rig. They were not professional carvers. They were watermen who needed working tools and made their own.
What they produced is now considered one of the highest expressions of American folk art. The Dudleys carved a canvasback whose form was unlike anything else on the coast. The bill flowed into the lower cheeks with no visible seam. The chest carried real volume. The body curved with a sculptural quality that the auction record calls one of the finer sculptural solutions in the decoy world. Joel Barber, who in 1934 wrote the founding text of decoy collecting, opened his book with the Dudleys and put their birds on the first three plates. William Mackey, who wrote the second founding text in 1965, did the same.
Long-form attribution is always to the brothers, or to the shop. Lee lived until 1942 and the market sometimes shortcuts to his name, but the record is clear that both men carved, and Lem may have done the bulk of it.
The Gun Clubs of Currituck Sound
Around the brothers' shop, a parallel economy was running at full speed. Starting in the 1850s, wealthy Northern industrialists began buying acreage along Currituck Sound for private waterfowling estates. The Currituck Shooting Club, chartered in 1857, was the second hunting club incorporated in the United States and the oldest still operating today. By the early twentieth century, more than a hundred clubs lined the sound from the Back Bay of Virginia south to Hatteras Island. The Whalehead Club, the Pine Island Club, the Swan Island Club, the Pocahontas Fowling Club, names that sat alongside the families who built them, Knapps and Reids and Vanderbilts and Goulds.
These were not casual operations. They were architecturally serious, professionally guided, and stocked with rigs of working decoys that needed to be replaced and added to constantly.
The Watermen Who Carved for the Clubs
Around those clubs lived the communities that made them function. Guides. Caretakers. Cooks. Marsh guards. And the watermen, whose hands knew both the water and the wood. They carved the decoys the clubs hunted over. They guided the members on the morning hunts. They ran the boats. The world of Currituck Sound at the turn of the last century was a layered one, the refined visitors above and the working watermen below, both bound by the same birds.
DECOY exists in the seam between those two worlds. Between the grit and soul of the working people of those communities and the refinement of those who visited. We are trying to tell their story.
How DECOY Found Keith Hendrickson
When the brand was being built, the question of who would carve the masters for our wooden decoys mattered more than anything else. We needed a carver whose discipline was the studied recreation of the traditional decoy schools, not someone making a new thing in an old style. We found Keith Hendrickson.
Keith lives in Locust, North Carolina, in the Piedmont. He is alive and actively carving. His work for DECOY draws on the Currituck and Carteret County traditions, with the Delaware River tradition entering where the historical record calls for it. His strongest single influence is the Dudley shop on Knotts Island, and the canvasback that came out of it.
Engineering a Traditional Decoy for the Modern Hunter
The Heritage Series wooden decoys are designed from Keith's originals and produced from his carved masters. The hard part was not the body. The hard part was the keel.
The Keel Problem
Traditional Knotts Island decoys rarely if ever carried a keel. They were carved for a specific water, a specific rig, and a specific way of hunting. A modern decoy needs a keel to ride right in modern water. We flattened the bottom of the master so the foam could be tooled, but we drew the keel shape to follow the curved belly profile of the historical reference decoys. From the side, our foam decoy carries the same silhouette as the wooden bird that Keith drew his inspiration from. The line that runs from the bill, across the chest, under the body, and back to the tail, is the line the Dudleys carved.
From Decoy to Logo: Drawing the Canvasback
When the time came to develop a logo for the brand, the answer was already in the shop. Keith Hendrickson drew the DECOY canvasback from original Dudley reference material. He drew the logo with a separated structure between the head, the body, and the keel. The head sits above the body. The body floats above the keel. They are three distinct parts.
A Blueprint of Our Brand
The separation is not stylistic. It is a literal blueprint of our product. The common decoy body. The interchangeable, removable heads. The integrated keel that matches the original profile of the reference decoy style. The logo carries the lineage of the regional story we are trying to tell and a working schematic of the product all at once. And that is how our logo was created.
The duck on your chest pocket is a decoy. The decoy is from Knotts Island. The carver is from Locust. The brand is from New Bern. The story is from the water.