One of Long Island’s historic vessels is docked in a Maryland marina, and one woman has found herself leading the cause to return the Joseph B. Glancy dredge boat back to its original home.

The 54-foot wooden oyster dredge is over 100 years old and spent decades working in the oyster industry in the Long Island Sound and Oyster Bay. Kelly Hoover, the founder of the American Maritime Heritage Project, a small business owner and aesthetician, said she first became interested in the boat after noticing it docked at the same marina as her own boat, leading to her becoming fascinated by its history.

“I just became curious, and I’ve always been involved in history and I kept thinking, well, boats have names, names are sentimental, let’s see where this goes, and I just actually found that researching that vessel was a lot easier than researching somebody from a tombstone,” Hoover said.

She said she went down a “rabbit hole,” looking into everything she could find about the boat, which sparked her current push to get Joseph B. Glancy restored so that it can be remembered as a piece of history, rather than be scrapped.

Ruben Greene, a master carpenter and boatbuilder, constructed the wooden boat, originally named W.H. Hoy, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1901. Frank M. Flower & Sons renamed the dredge after Joseph B. Glancy, an oyster cultivator and shellfish researcher, after it served the company for decades.

Frank M. Flower & Sons has been active in the Oyster Bay oyster business since the 19th century, including decades when they had private leases on part of the bay. That ended in 2024, when the company’s lease expired and the Town of Oyster Bay put a moratorium on shellfishing as it examined the bay’s environmental conditions.