One summer day in 1922, two attorneys from Lorraine, Ohio were fishing on the Boardman River in northern Michigan. There was a mayfly hatch going on that morning but they weren’t having any luck matching it. So they go see their friend Leonard Halladay who lived in nearby Mayfield, Ohio. Len Halladay ran a hotel there and he had been a well-respected fisherman and guide for the last 30 years or so– and the two attorneys were happy to take advice from this veteran, who gave the elder gentleman a sample of a pattern he’d just come up with.
The fly he gave him was a fairly bushy dry fly with golden pheasant tippets for the tail, a gray wool yarn body, grizzly hackle tips for wings and then grizzly and brown hackle wrapped up front. The next morning the guy takes it out on the Boardman and has a great day with it. Later that day he tells Halladay how successful it was for him and asked him what the fly was called.
Halladay said “Well it doesn’t have a name yet but since you’re the first one who’s had a good catch with it, I’ll name it after you.” The fisherman he gave that fly to was Charles Adams and that is how, arguably the greatest dry fly ever created was born.
Now despite the success of this original version and its growing reputation over the next few years, it did evolve a bit. First the body was changed to a muskrat dubbing, which sheds water a little bit better than wool, and it made the fly a little more buoyant. Then by the 1930s the fly made its way east toward the Catskills, and you know Catskill fly tires… they changed it up a bit. They made the body a little bit thinner and changed the tail to grizzly and brown hackle fibers. That is the version that caught fire.
One of the premier outdoor writers at the time, Ray Bergman wrote an article in the May 1937 issue of Outdoor Life called “Flies for Odd Situations” where he talked about the Adams. Then in April of 1938 Pennsylvania Angler magazine had an article by R.W. McCafferty called “Trout Tackle Suggestions” where he talked about it– and he may have been the first one to show it tied as a spent wing.
Bergman wrote about it again in June 1940 then Harold Smedley had it in his 1944 book “Fly Patterns and Their Origins” and the pattern has been written about probably hundreds of times in the last 80 years.
So why does this pattern work and what exactly does it imitate? Well most think it is a mayfly imitation, and I fall into that camp too, but there are folks who think it was created as a caddis or even a stonefly. But Tom Deshaine, the guru of Michigan Dry Flies, had a different take. He thinks Halladay may have created this as an alder fly. All these are reasonable theories but we may never know what Halladay was actually thinking.
Notable Catskill fisherman and historian Ed Van Put probably had it right when he said, “The Adams doesn’t look exactly like anything but it looks enough like a lot of things that it just catches fish.”
The version I’m showing you here is the modern version, or maybe I should say “modern” because it’s still 80 years old. If you haven’t tied or fished this thing in a while, give it another shot. It is still a great fly and one a lot of people think is THE greatest dry fly to ever come out of America.
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