Carroll's Island is one of many places along the Chesapeake
Bay where vibrant stories of dogs, decoys, guns and waterfowl resonate up from the shoreline. The stories from Carroll's Island Ducking Club, which was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, offer special insights about the Chesapeake Bay's waterfowling heritage. In this warm, informative book, C. John Sullivan Jr., one of the nation's
leading decoy collectors and scholars, documents the development of the Chesapeake Bay retriever and how gunners once devised decoys and new firearms and enjoyed the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay. Eventually Carroll's Island Ducking Club would disappear, but its legacy can still be seen today in the role members played in establishing the Chesapeake Bay retriever as Maryland's state dog.
C. John Sullivan is Director of the Department of Assessments and Taxation for the State of Maryland and the author of numerous articles about the Chesapeake Bay region. A widely recognized expert on decoys, he has served as a consultant to the Maryland Historical Society, the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art, the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum, and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. His books include Waterfowling: The Chesapeake Legacy, Robert F. McGaw: A Chronicle of Letters, Old Ocean City, and most recently Waterfowling on the Chesapeake, 1819-1936. He also co-authored the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum Collection book.