Buyboat is the most familiar term for a particular style of traditional Chesapeake workboat, but it suggests only one of many jobs done by these versatile craft. As buyboats, they bought seafood from water men working small boats, then transported and sold the catch to packing houses or city merchants. As run boats or runners, they were the company-owned vessels that transferred the catch to the company docks. As freight boats or bay freighters, they hauled many things from here to there—watermelons, lumber, coal, canning supplies—often doing the work that would later be taken over by trucks. As packet boats, they carried mail, supplies, and passengers between the mainland and the bay’s island communities. They served under the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, at least one was officially a school boat, and an untold number of them may have run rum in the days of Prohibition. If those were not enough names, their builders called them deck boats, because the hulls were decked over to create cargo holds, allowing the boats to work in many bay fisheries.