The Lord Baltimore was invented in the 1800s by Professor
Mayer of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken,
New Jersey. The fly was developed for the brook trout in
Maine. Coincidentally, Dr. Henshall, creator of several
famous flies of the period, invented a similar fly, the
Oriole for black bass down south. Here's what Dr. Henshall
says about these flies:
"Professor Mayer and I, being natives of Baltimore, and
knowing that black and yellow [I think he means orange
here] formed a good and taking combination in an
artificial fly, each designed, unknown to the other, a
fly to embody these colors; and as they are the heraldic
colors of the State of Maryland, and were the heraldic
colors of Lord Baltimore, Professor Mayer aptly named
his trout fly Lord Baltimore, while I designated my
black bass fly the Oriole, from the Baltimore oriole,
or hanging-bird, which beautiful songster was named in
honor of Lord Baltimore, as its colors were the same as
his own, black and orange."
The Oriole, while originally having orange wings, soon
became changed somehow, to a fly possessing canary yellow
wings. This was not Dr. Henshall's doing, it just changed
over time for whatever reason. Originally the Oriole and
Lord Baltimore were reverse images of each other, with
the Lord Baltimore having an orange body and black wings,
and the Oriole having a black body and orange wings. The
fact that the Oriole morphed into a fly with yellow wings
ultimately explains Dr. Henshall's confusion early in the
paragraph above.
The version I've presented here is more in the style of
the one shown in Ray Bergman's Trout. I
was tying some for a friend, and he wanted them in the
Bergman vein. He's doing some experiments with Bergman
wet flies of different color schemes, and I'm anxious to
hear more about his work. But that will be another column.
Here is the recipe for the Lord Baltimore:
The Lord Baltimore:
About Eric:
I started fly fishing as a teen in and around my hometown
of Plattsburgh, New York, primarily on the Saranac River.
I started tying flies almost immediately and spent hours
with library books written by Ray Bergman, Art Lee, and
A. J. McClane. Almost from the beginning I liked tying
just as much as I liked fishing and spent considerable
time at the vise creating hideous monstrosities that
somehow caught fish anyway. Then one day I came upon a
group of flies that had been put out at a local drug store
that had been tied by Francis Betters of Wilmington, N.Y.
My life changed that day and so did my flies, dramatically.
Even though I never met Fran back then, I've always
considered him to be one of my biggest influences.
I had a career in music for twenty years or so and didn't
fish much, though I did fish at times. The band I was with
had its fifteen seconds of fame when we were asked to be in
John Mellencamp's movie "Falling From Grace." I am the
keyboard player on the right in the country club scene in
the middle of the movie. Don't blink. It's on HBO all the
time. We got to meet big Hollywood stars and record in John's
studio. It was a blast.
So how did I wind up contributing to the Just Old Flies
column on FAOL? I'm not sure, it was something that I simply
wanted very badly to do, and they let me. Many of the old flies
take me back to the Adirondacs and my youth, and I guess I get
to relive some of it through the column. I've spent many happy
hours fishing and tying over the years, and tying these flies
brings back memories of great days on the water, and intense
hours spent looking at the flies in the fly plates in the old
books and trying to get my flies to look like them. And now,
here I am, still doing that to this day. ~ EA
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