SYMHC Classics: Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Our recent episode on William Firthwells and Mildred Weeks Wells reminded me of our very long ago episode on the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars. This episode originally came out August nineteenth, twenty thirteen, long enough ago that it is not in a number of podcast players anymore, including the one that I used to try to go listen to it to make sure we did not say anything super incorrect. I also feel like I sound a lot different in it than I do now. Maybe At the end of the episode, we talk about efforts to restore native oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay area. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement was signed in twenty fourteen, with a goal of restoring the oyster beds in ten Bay tributaries by this year twenty twenty five. A press release from the Chesapeake Bay Program in July describes this goal as within reach, with reef construction and seating complete in nine of the ten tributaries and the tenth expected to be completed in the near future, so good news for Chesapeake Bay. Enjoy the episode Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Holly, Yeah. Do you like oysters? I love oysters. Yeah. I won't do raw oysters. I mean I have, It's just not my thing, But almost any other iteration of oysters I will eat that involves cooking. Yeah. Yeah. Oyster stew is a big favorite. Fried oysters, oyster poe boys that you used to be able to get at a restaurant here delicious. Yeah, so nowadays we thanks to you know, their scarcity and also the pearl making, oysters are associated pretty well with luxury, or at least with being a sometimes food. Yeah, they're not for most people something that you eat every day. And that pearl association is a little loft because most pearls are cultured now. But still I'm having a flash to the Japan Pavilion at Epcot. You know that big department store they have in the bottom, they have like a little oyster tank where you could pick your oyster and pop it open and maybe there's a pearl and talk. Yeah, it's a big excitement when people find a pearl. They like clap and ring a bell. That is super fun. So Like with many scarcities, this one is completely man made. Before the eighteen hundreds, oysters were plentiful in North America, but in the years after the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War, the oyster supply became so scarce that people actually turned to oyster piracy. The bloodshed peaked in the late eighteen hundreds, but the strife that we're talking about went on for almost one hundred years. So what we're talking about today the Chesapeake Bay oyster War. And I think a couple of listeners have requested this one, and I tried to go back looking through the spreadsheet to find names, and I did not record the names, So I am sorry. The spreadsheet became unusable in its scope and length. It reached epic proportions not easily wrangled by man. Yes, so people, as we know have been eating oysters pretty much for all of human history. There's archaeological evidence of oyster eating that goes all the way back to the Neanderthals, and pretty much every place there were oysters, there were people eating them. In colonial America, they really became a staple, and they weren't used just for food. Their shells were also important and used in everything from plaster to animal feed. When European settlers arrived in North America, oysters were, as we've been suggesting, quite abundant. Oyster beds were really expansive, so much so that unsuspecting ships could easily run aground on them. And you may also recall from our episode on Jamestown's Starving Time that at one point John Smith actually tried to reduce the fort's food demands by sending people away to live on oysters because they were plentful, full of protein eaten everywhere. Yeah, pretty easily acquired too. These oysters were also a whole lot bigger than they are today. A market size oyster today is at least three inches long, but foot long oysters were a common sight back then. Oysters are a lot like lobsters in this way. Early settlers told stories of giant and plentiful lobsters, but once people started eating a lot of them, they didn't have the chance to grow that big anymore. And if you're interested in the lobster's side of this story, you can hear it in the Memory Palace episode The Lost Lobsters. And for a while after the arrival of the European settlers, the oyster population in North America was just fine. It was easily keeping up with the demands of consumption, and even with the influx of people, there still weren't enough people here consuming oysters to put a dent in what was at that time a very robust oyster population. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and sometimes I think we should call this podcast thanks industrial Revolution. It was indeed quite impactful in a variety of ways. I'm good and some really not. Yeah. With advances in harvesting, food preservation, and transportation, all of that changed. Once people could harvest giant masses of oysters and then canned big batches of them in factories and ship them everywhere by railroad, over harvesting immediately became a problem. The dredge was introduced in the late seventeen hundreds of New England, and this was actually a big two sy jaw that would scrape up huge numbers of oysters all at the same time, so when one fell, swoop and on top of steeply reducing how much time it took to harvest all those oysters. The dredges, unfortunately were scooping up so many that they didn't leave behind enough oysters to repopulate those beds. Yeah, and they would throw back the ones that were too small for the most part, sometimes not when they were desperate for oysters. But even so, it wasn't enough to really restock the area, and the effect on the New England oyster population was almost immediate. By the eighteen hundreds, oyster populations in New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had pretty much collapsed, but demand had not gotten any smaller, so people turned south to find more oysters, and in Virginia and Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay its name actually comes from an Algonquin word meaning great shellfish Bay, oysters were still really abundant, but Virginia, which had claimed to the southern half of the bay, and Maryland, which had the northern part and the Potomac River leading off of it, were not super keen on the ak andresopers coming along to eat up all of their oysters, and so each of those municipalities passed laws allowing oyster harvesting only by state residents. This sounds like a good idea on paper. On paper, yeah, it led to some problems. By the mid eighteen hundreds, people had figured out how to steam can oysters and railroads were also starting to connect coastal towns to bigger cities, making it so much easier and faster to transport the oysters once they were canned. And all of these factors combined with the influx of labor and investment after the Civil War to make the Chesapeake Bay a prime opportunity for a new industry. It was basically a giant oyster rush. People were just swooping right in there to get in on the oysterrection. Crisfield, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the Bay, became a nexus of oyster activity. Railroads led out of town was actually named for John Crisfield, who was the president of the Eastern Shore Railroad, and it had easy access to some of Maryland's richest oyster beds. These were in the Tangier Sound and could only be reached by dredge. By eighteen seventy two, about six hundred oyster vessels were sailing out of Crisfield. And meanwhile, Baltimore, Maryland, became the capital of oyster canning, with more than one hundred processing houses, and these canneries were largely the work of New England investors. The city was at a prime location because it was connected to Crisfield by the Eastern Shore Railroad, and it was connected to the rest of the world by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, so it was really like the perfect geographical location. Oyster harvesting was also really lucrative work. In the eighteen sixties, the captain of an oil stern dredging ship might make two thousand dollars a year, which does not sound like much, but the average Maryland income was only five hundred dollars a year. And of course there's a reason it was so lucrative, and that's because it was also extremely dangerous. The legal oyster season, you know, the months with an r was during cold, wet weather. An oysterman had to be strong and really hardy, so being constantly exposed to the elements would bring on all kinds of ailments, so you really did have to be in great health and really strong of body. Watermen were prone to a frostbite, they could get broken bones and what's called oyster hand, which is an infection that you get if you are cut by an oyster shell. And it was especially hazardous for inexperienced workers, as you can imagine being swept off to sea by the water or knocked off the deck by a swinging boom on a dredging ship. Happened pretty commonly, and as a consequence, they also would sometimes accidentally fish up the bodies of men who had fallen in previously, so also kind of a gruesome activity and a job not for people faint of heart or weak of stomach. Now, towns along the waterfront became a lot like gold Rush towns in the Old West, except on water and for oysters. They were full of brawling saloons, brothels, and a generally seedy element, much to the chagrin of the also thriving Methodist community there. The situation was bad enough in Chrisfield that it actually went dry in eighteen seventy five, but speakeasies continued to thrive and they had to arrest so many illegally drunk people that they needed to build an extra jail, and there continued to be a huge demand for oysters, so much so that there were not always enough qualified laborers to man the boats, so captains would actually sometimes kidnap men from these gold Rush style towns and actually for them to work on the boats. Immigrants who didn't speak English were particularly high risk for being abducted, and they were effectively imprisoned on these dredging ships. There are horrible stories of beatings, torture, and killings, and those stories became pretty common during this time. In the middle of all this lawlessness, by the mid eighteen eighties, people were hauling millions of bushels of oysters out of the Chesapeake Bay annually, fifteen million bushels in eighteen eighty four alone, the Chesapeake Bay was supplying about half of the world's oysters. But of course, just as claim jumping plagued the West during the gold Rush, tensions ran high among multiple factions during this oyster boom, And since we've already described it as kind of a lawless and wild space, you can imagine what starts to happen. Yes, there were two main methods of harvesting oysters. In shallow water, people would lean over the side of the boat and collect oysters from the bed using these long tongs, so they scraped up small loads of oysters at a time. And then in deep water, ships would use the dredges that we talk about earlier. So obviously the tongers couldn't go into deeper water, but the dredging ships could work their way into the shallows, so the Tongers were constantly trying to fight off the dredgers. The Tongers petitioned the government for protection, but they really didn't get a lot of response. As continues to be the case, some people felt like it was the people with the most money and the biggest ships that were getting the most attention. So the Tongers armed themselves, and it wasn't just the people who were out on the water. Coastal towns had to arm themselves too. By eighteen seventy one, Tongers were regularly firing on dredgers that worked into their territory. And on top of that, Virginia and Maryland could not agree where the state line was, nor could they patrol it adequately, so when it came to the areas closest to the state line, the Maryland and Virginia oystermen were also fighting. They were at each other's throats, and sometimes there were even disputes between oyster harvesters from neighboring counties. So it was kind of a free for all of people with various issues all going at it in the Chesapeake Bay. Yeah, with all the fights between the tongers and the dredgers and between Maryland and Virginia harvesters. Things got bloody fast. People who were in one way or another on the wrong side of oyster low became known and the news and to the rest of the population as oyster pirates. Apart from all of this violence, all this aggressive harvesting was really damaging the oyster population. So by the mid eighteen sixties, just about every jurisdiction had put some laws into place to try to protect the oysters from being harvested to extinction. So regulations like what sizes of oysters could be harvested and when, and there were also taxes imposed on the oyster harvests, but the enforcement was not really there. It was pretty lax. Nobody was really willing to take up the political risk of dampening the oyster trade, which was so lucrative, and with such a vast network of waterways to monitor, there really wasn't anybody with resources to do it anyway. So they passed laws, but they were really just on the books and not so much in practice. Yeah, Maryland formed an oyster Police Force in eighteen sixty eight. It was commanded by a man named Hunter Davidson, and he patrolled in a steamboat named Layla, which was a decrepit tug from the Civil War, but he only stayed with it for a handful of years. The Oyster pirates outnumbered him and had much better, nibbler, faster ships. He would actually use a howitzer to try to sink illegal vessels and that did sometimes work, and he set armed blockades at the mouths of some of the most highly contested waterways. Neither of these was a popular move, to the surprise of no one. At least once, somebody tried to assassinate him. Oyster pirates boarded the Layla in the middle of the night on January twenty eighth, eighteen seventy one, where he was asleep in a locked cabin. When the pirates started struggling with the door, It woke him up and gave him time to grab a revolver and defend himself, so the assassination attempt was not successful, but he did not stay on the job too much longer after that. The Maryland government added more ships and staff in eighteen seventy following a number of rather unflattering articles about how many bodies had been washing up on the shore, so it actually did become a slightly more effective force. In eighteen seventy one, the drudgers actually began to claim that law enforcement was targeting them unfairly for minor or even non existent infractions, and Virginia kind of lagged behind this enforcement effort. A financially strapped state government had sold the three vessels that used for maritime police work in eighteen seventy five, which left it no real way to enforce any of the laws for several years. By the late eighteen seventies, things were really becoming dire. In eighteen seventy eight, Francis Winslow, who was a former Navy officer, actually conducted a survey of the bay's oysters and documented that harvesting was vastly outpacing the oyster's ability to reproduce. And at this point both states started to get much more serious about trying to conserve and to stop the piracy. Like once they realized this business was going to completely dry up if they didn't get on it, Yeah, suddenly everybody was a little more motivated. Between eighteen eighty two and eighteen eighty five, William Evelyn Cameron, who was the actual governor of Virginia personally led a series of anti pirate attacks up the Chesapeake through Maryland to the mouth of the Rappahannock River. He had a military background and had been a captain in the Confederate militia, and he had taken a serious wound at the Battle of Second Manassas also known as Second Bull Run. He led a small flotilla of heavily arm ships under the cover of night in an attempt to stop the piracy. In his first rate in eighteen eighty two, he had his fleet sail in a formation so that it would look like a tug was pulling a disabled freighter, So they kind of arranged themselves in a disguise, which is really fun to think about. He managed to capture several illicit dredgers this way, and their captains and crew stood trial and had their boats and gear confiscated. The governor did, however, eventually pardon them. This is really a best of both worlds situation for Governor Cameron. He had showed himself to be brave and daring and getting something done, but then he didn't actually punish them too harshly. They had the sympathy of a lot of voters, so he kind of satisfied all of the people. Point Yeta, he got a boost in popularity off of it. Had his cake and ate it too. I did. That's pretty smart. It only happened once. You can't keep pulling those, you know, we'll start calling you wishy washy. The boost of his popularity, of course, quickly faded, and the Dredgers went right back to dredging. The raids he led after that point weren't nearly as successful, and they actually became the target of ridicule. There was even a comic opera at the Norfolk Academy of Music that was performed about the whole thing on April third of eighteen eighty three, called Driven from the Seas or Pirate Dredger's Doom. Although Governor Cameron's administration became kind of a shambles, in March of eighteen eighty four, Virginia enacted a bill that established a Board on the Chesapeake and its Tributaries, which created and funded an actual naval force to protect Virginia's oyster interests. Virginia had steamers patrolling the bay by December of that year, and in its first year of service. The Aquatic Police force created by the Board had actually apprehended sixty one illicit oyster vessels, and with that enforcement in place, the state's tax revenue from oysters magically started to climb again. Law enforcement also became a much bigger focus following the murder of Otto Meyer. He was a German immigrant, and he was killed in eighteen eighty four. He had been beaten daily and tortured aboard the dredging ship EVA. Two of his German shipmates reported what had happened to the German consulate in Baltimore once they returned to shore, and at this point, since it was basically an international incident, the effort to get things under control really started in earnest but unfortunately those efforts were hampered by the ongoing tensions between Virginia and Maryland, and by the spring of eighteen ninety four, the two states governments had completely stopped trying to negotiate with each other. They just gave up. On top of that, in spite of the fledgling conservation efforts, the oyster population really started to bottom out. By the eighteen nineties, there were so many oystermen on the water that they couldn't break even on the halls they were bringing in, so they started taking oysters that were under three inches long, and those are the ones that normally would have been thrown back to repopulate. Oyster packing houses also started to fail, since oysters are of course filter feeders. Water quality in the bay plummeted as well, and this was a downward spiral since the dirty water was also harder for oysters to live in. A lot of things changed after the turn of the century. In nineteen oh six, the introduction of gasoline powered dredging equipment made dredging possible with less manpower, so that cut out the need to force people into labor, while also of course putting some people who chose to do work out of work. By the nineteen twenties, the annual oyster yield had dropped from that impressive number of fifteen million bushels from the eighteen eighties to a mere three million annually, So that's a very significant drop off. And in spite of there being so much less oyster, you know, boon to haul in. Over tensions continued on and off for the next thirty years. In nineteen forty two, a new oyster bed was discovered on Swan Point up the Potomac River from the Bay in Maryland, and law enforcement had real trouble keeping poachers away from that area because a lot of Maryland's boats at that point were engaged in World War Two. Poachers from Virginia that were known as the Mosquito Fleet would cross the state line to plunder oysters and then run from the police in high speed boats. The last bloodshed in the oyster Wars was in nineteen fifty nine, when a Virginia man named Berkeley Mewse was shot by police after harvesting oysters from the Potomac in Maryland. He died from his injuries, and at that point there was there were a lot of people who just called this out as absurd. The the refrain was kind of, it is nineteen fifty nine, we should not be killing people over oysters. Yeah, Virginia and Maryland were at this point already trying to work out their oyster differences, and so Mus's death, as Tracy said, kind of put that into high gear. They started negotiating in earnest again and eventually a six member bi State Commission actually worked out an agreement which is called the Potomac River Fisheries Bill, and that agreement made it to the ballot. It passed the popular vote, and it was eventually sent to Washington for congressional ratification. John F. Kennedy signed it into law on December fifth, nineteen sixty two, at which point then Governor's Tows of Maryland and Harrison of Virginia met and had a seafood launch with oysters to celebrate. But unfortunately, the oyster population in the Bay has continued to fall, especially following new diseases appearing there in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and it really bottomed out in the nineteen eighties. Today's harvests of native oysters are less than one percent of what they were at their eighteen eighties peak. However, the twenty twelve Fall Oyster Survey reported a ninety three percent survival rate among the state's oyster population, the highest it has been since nineteen eighty three. So things are maybe starting to look up a little for native oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. And also no one is killing people over them anymore. It kind of makes me want to naughtat oysters for a little while, Like I'm doing my part. Well, oysters, so many, so many seafoods that I love to eat so much are are in some way or other a conservation problem. I think it's the Monterey Bay Aquarium has that Seafood Watch program where you can look up and see whether the seafood that you were eating is sustainably harvested or not, which is yeah cool. I think they're actually working in conjunction and with other aquariums. Yeah, a lot of aquariums have banded together to kind of fund that initiative and promote it. Yeah. I think they're sort of just the spearhead of a much bigger effort. So yes, oysters are delicious, not worth killing people over. Yeah, although I'm you know, if it were your only livelihood, you can understand how it could escalate. I still don't think you should be doing that then, obviously, But you see, you know how all these things happened very quickly. Money Yep, kind of all comes down to it. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.