B rad Havill’ s handcrafted wooden lure looks almost too beautiful to cast into the murky waters of a Berkshire pond. Hand-painted in iridescent pinks and greens— the pink is called“ electric chicken”— sealed with glasssmooth urethane, it could easily sit on a collector’ s shelf. But when it comes to the cast, it hits the surface and almost seems to come alive. The lure swims, rolling and diving like a wounded baitfish struggling for life.“ One guy at a craft show said it’ s too pretty to use,” Havill laughs.“ He put it on his mantle. I suggested he put it in the water and see how it works.”
The customer took his advice and tried it out on Otis Reservoir, catching three“ personal best” fish in a single outing. One was a species Havill hadn’ t thought would chase his lure.
In an age of mass-produced plastic lures stamped out by the thousands, Havill is bringing back something American fishing lost decades ago: wooden lures built to last generations. His aren’ t tackle-box relics gathering dust; rather, they are precision instruments, engineered to outperform and outlast anything else in the water.
Wooden fishing lures represent one of America’ s oldest sporting traditions. In the early 1900s, pioneers like James Heddon of Michigan began carving hardwood bass plugs, so called because they were essentially“ plugged” into the water, mimicking bait fish. Heddon’ s creations revolutionized the industry. They cast better than the wire and metal baits of the time and had a more lifelike swimming action.
By 1916, the Creek Chub Bait Company in Garrett, Indiana, introduced the Wiggler, featuring a metal lip that made it wobble and dive as you retrieved it by cranking your reel and dragging the lure through the water, hoping to trigger strikes from fish like bass and pike. The South Bend Bait Company, which operated from 1909 until the 1960s, became famous for its Bass-Oreno lure with a scooped-out mouth. These Indiana companies helped establish wooden lures as the gold standard for serious anglers.
But when manufacturers switched to plastic in the 1970s, something was lost.
The plastic versions didn’ t perform the same way. The patented metal lips that gave vintage lures their distinctive action were abandoned. For decades, those designs existed only in collectors’ tackle boxes, until some anglers like Brad Havill decided to bring them back.
Havill, who grew up in Tyringham, is a lifelong angler who has fished everywhere the Navy sent him— Virginia, north of Chicago, Texas, and San Diego. He’ s cast lines on shipping channels and open ocean, freshwater lakes, and saltwater bays. In his early 30s, he decided to try fly fishing.“ It only took a few casts to realize I needed more flies,” he says.“ And flies aren’ t cheap. So, I started tying my own.”
After the Navy, Havill went back to college, where he earned a master’ s degree in library science. His latest passion came from a chance encounter with someone who built wooden lures. Havill was intrigued. He reverse-engineered the originals, studying vintage designs that manufacturers had abandoned. The original, patented metal lip that gave the lures their distinctive swimming action had been seemingly lost to time.
“ I like them, so I decided to make them,” Havill says, who had used a lathe in high school but not since. Making them meant solving problems that no one else was solving anymore.
To design the lip for his lures, he made a template from a vintage lure made by the Creek Chub Lure Company— one of
Brad Havill is bringing back something American fishing lost decades ago: wooden lures built to last generations.
the vintage lures from that company in his shop is date-stamped 1920. He cut the stainless steel by hand but now makes them using an old die-cutting machine.“ If I want to sell them, they’ ve got to be uniform,” he explains.
But the innovation goes deeper than the lip. Instead of screws holding components to the wood, which is the weak point in vintage lures, Havill uses through-wire construction, something he adopted from larger, saltwater fishing lures. One continuous piece of stainlesssteel wire runs through the lip, the body, and the hooks.“ Everything is connected,” says Havill, whose workshop is in Richmond.“ So, it’ s going to be really hard for a fish to break it.”
He proved that durability when he landed a 35-inch fish on one of his smaller lures. The fish left teeth marks in the wood but didn’ t straighten the hooks or break the lure. Havill designs to far
Spring 2026 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 75