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Mary Orvis Marbury: A Life in Flies
Before Trout Bum: Early Years with John Gierach
17/12/2025
Going Fishing with Cane and Going Fishing with Cane – The Rod Makers
18/12/2025
by Steve Wait
$90. Published by Fly Fishing Treasures. Can be bought online from www.flyfishingtreasures.com
THIS book is a most comprehensive and detailed account of Mary Orvis Marbury and her flies, covering her trout, salmon and bass flies. It is a signed, limited edition, 215-page coffee-table-size book that is similar in design, size and quality to the author’s previous work, Fly FishingTreasures.
The photographs of her flies take more than half the book and are excellent.The text is comprehensive, reflecting the level of research that the author has put into it.
The early pages detail the founding and development of the Orvis company in the early days of US tackle-making, with photographs of Charles Orvis rods and reels. These pages explain how, to be able to supply good-quality flies, Charles was forced to tie flies in-house.
Trout Fishing at Wagon Wheel Gap by William Jackson from Panel #29 of the Mary Orvis Marbury fly display
Enter Charles’s daughter Mary. She was trained by John Haily, a Scottish immigrant fly tyer, who knew British trout and salmon fly patterns.When the training was complete, Charles mailed his customers, saying that the company was now able to supply quality standard fly patterns plus any special patterns they might require. He also invited them to tell him their favourite patterns and how they fished with them.
Their replies gave Charles the inside information that he needed to build a successful fly-tying business. He also used the data to help him to write Fishing with the Fly, published in 1883, which in practice served as a catalogue of Orvis flies at no cost to the company at all.
This approach was taken a stage furthe when Mary wrote her best-seller Favorite Flies, published in 1892, and sold it at the rather stiff price of $5 a copy. It was a win/win situation for the Orvis company.
The author has included several pages of Mary’s flies mounted on Orvis cards as they were sold by the company, and the full-page illustrations come from three sources – 29 frames of flies are from her Favorite Flies, a further 29 frames from the Orvis fly-tying shop itself and 43 frames from the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was held in Chicago in 1893.
These Columbian frames not only display Mary’s flies but also photographs of locations where they were used. Full details of these frames is given in a separate 59-page volume, which adds more background to the Mary Orvis story.The author has also called on Lee Schechter to write a chapter on tying techniques for Mary’s Gaudy wet flies in the main book.
Without the level of detail that the author goes into, this book might cause some British anglers to take one glance at the photographs of Mary’s flies and think they are all just flash attractors. But as the book makes clear, she had knowledge and appreciation of British fly dressers. She even tied a frame of Halford patterns.
She also followed Arthur Ronalds’ lead in his Fly Fisher’s Entomology of 1836 and started standardising American patterns and fly names.That’s something that has benefitted American anglers ever since.
John Knott
