Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars

In the years after the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War, the oyster supply became so scarce that people turned to oyster piracy. The bloodshed peaked in the late 1800s, but the strife went on for almost 100 years.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tree C. V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Frying. Holly,
do you like oysters? I love oysters. I won't do

(00:23):
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, Oyster stew is a big favorite.
Fried oysters, oyster po 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

(00:48):
the pearl making, oysters are associated pretty well with luxury,
or at least with being is sometimes food. They're not
for most people something that you eat every day, And
that pearl association is aloft 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

(01:09):
in the bottom, they have like a little oyster tank
where you can pick your oyster and pop it open
and maybe there's a pearl. And it's a big excitement
when people find a pearl. They'd 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,

(01:31):
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 a
hundred years. So what we're talking about today the Chesapeake

(01:54):
Bay oyster War. Uh. 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 and
I did not record the names. So I am sorry.
The spreadsheet became unusable and in its scope and length

(02:14):
it reached epic proportions. Uh. Not easily wrangled by man. Uh. 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

(02:37):
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

(03:00):
on Jamestown Serving 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 plentiful,
full of protein, eating everywhere. Yeah, pretty easily acquired to
These Oysters were also a whole lot bigger than they
are today. A market size oyster today is at least

(03:22):
three inches long, but foot long oysters were a common
site 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 lobsters side of this story,

(03:42):
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,
there still weren't enough people here consuming oysters to put
a dent in what was at that time a very

(04:04):
robust oyster population. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and sometimes
I think we should call this podcast thanks industrial Revolution.
It uh was indeed quite impactful in a variety of
ways I'm good and some I'm really not. With advances
and harvesting, food preservation, and transportation, all of that changed.
Once people could harvest giant masses of oysters and then

(04:28):
can 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 twocy jaw that would
scrape up huge numbers of oysters all at the same time,

(04:49):
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 oyster is to repopulate those beds,
and they would throw back the ones that were too
small for the most part, but sometimes not when they
were desperate for oysters. But even so, it wasn't enough

(05:11):
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

(05:31):
Virginia and Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay its name actually
comes from an Algonquin word meaning great shellfish. May oysters
were still really abundant, but Virginia, which had claimed to
the southern half of the bay, and Maryland, which had
the northern part uh and the Potomac River leading off
of it, we're not super keen on the Yankee interlopers

(05:52):
coming along to eat up all of their oysters, and
so each of those municipalities past laws allowing oyster harvest
only by state residents. That sounds like a good idea
on paper on paper, and 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

(06:14):
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
chest Peak Bay a prime opportunity for a new industry.
Uh it was basically a giant oyster rush. People were

(06:35):
just swooping right in there to get in on the
oyster action. Chris Field, Maryland, on the eastern shore of
the bay, became a nexus of oyster activity. Railroads led
out of town was actually named for John Chrisfield, 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

(06:57):
reached by dredge. By eight seventy two, you about six
hundred oyster vessels were sailing out of Chrisfield. And meanwhile Baltimore, Maryland,
became the capital of oyster canning with more than one
hundred processing houses, and these cannaries were largely the work
of New England investors. The city was at a prime

(07:17):
location because it was connected to Chrisfield 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 oyster dredging ship might make two thousand dollars

(07:39):
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. Uh. The
legal oyster season, you know the months with an r uh,
it was during cold, wet weather. An oyster man had

(08:00):
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

(08:22):
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 uh as a consequence, they also would sometimes
accidentally uh fish up the bodies of men who had
fallen in previously, so also kind of a gruesome activity

(08:47):
and a job not for people faint of heart or
weak of stomach. 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 chagrine of
the also thriving Methodist community there. The situation was bad

(09:11):
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 they're continued to be
a huge demand for oysters, so much so that there
were not always enough qualified laborers to man the boats,

(09:31):
so captains would actually sometimes kidnap men from these gold
rushed style towns and actually forced 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.

(09:55):
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

(10:17):
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. And shallow
water people would lean over the side of the boat
and collect oysters from the bed using these long tongs,

(10:37):
so they scraped up small loads of oysters at a time,
and then in deep water ships would use the dredges
that we talked 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

(10:59):
government for action, 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

(11:21):
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 area's closest to the
state line, the Maryland and Virginia oystermen were also fighting.
They were at each other's throats, and sometimes there were

(11:42):
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.
With all the fights between the tongers and the dredgers
and between Maryland and Virginia rosters, things got bloody fast.

(12:03):
People who were in one way or another on the
wrong side of oyster law became known and the news
and to the rest of the population as oyster pirates.
Apart from all of this violence, all this suggressive harvesting
was really damaging the oyster population. So by the mid
eighteen sixties, just about every jurisdiction had put some laws

(12:23):
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 uh there. It was pretty lax. Nobody was really
willing to take up the political risk of dampening the

(12:46):
oyster trade, which was so um lucrative and was 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
some hich In practice, Maryland formed an oyster police force
in eighteen sixty eight. It was commanded by a man

(13:06):
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, nimbler,
faster ships. He would actually use a howitzer to try
to sink illegal vessels and that did sometimes work. Uh

(13:29):
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
seventy one, where he was asleep in a locked cabin.

(13:50):
When the pirates started struggling with the door, it woke
him up and gave him time to grab her 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

(14:11):
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 dredgers 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. Financially strapped state government had sold the

(14:34):
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

(14:57):
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 he realized this business was going to completely dry
up if they didn't get on it, Suddenly everybody was
a little more motivated between eighteen eighty two and eighteen
eighty five, William Evelyn Cameron, who was the actual governor

(15:22):
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 armed ships under the cover of night in

(15:43):
an attempt to stop the piracy. In his first trade
in eighteen eighty two, he had his fleet sale 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. Uh.
He managed to capture several illicit dredgers this way, and
their captains and crew stood trial and had their boats

(16:05):
and gear confiscated. The governor did, however, eventually pardon them.
This was really the best of both worlds situation for
Governor Cameron. He had shown himself to be brave and
daring and getting something done, but then he didn't actually
punish them too harshly, and they had the sympathy of
a lot of voters, so he kind of satisfied all

(16:28):
of the people. At that point, he got a boost
in popularity off it had his cake and ate it
too did That's pretty smart. It only happened one. You
can't keep pulling those because people 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

(16:49):
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 Dredgers Doom.
Although Governor Cameron's administration became kind of a shambles, in

(17:10):
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

(17:31):
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 Mayor. He was a
German immigrant, and he was killed in eighteen eighty four.

(17:52):
He had been beaten daily and tortured aboard the dredging
ship EVA. Two of his German shipmates reported what had
had been to the German consulate in Baltimore once they
returned to shore, and at this point, since it was
basically an international incident, uh the effort to get things
under control really started in earnest, but unfortunately those efforts

(18:14):
were hampered by the ongoing tensions between Virginia and Maryland,
and by the spring of eighteen 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

(18:34):
oyster men 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

(18:56):
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 o six, the introduction of
gasoline powered dredging equipment made dredging possible with less manpower,
so that cut out the need to flce people into labor,
while also of course putting some people who chose to

(19:17):
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,

(19:38):
you know, moon to to haul in. Tensions continued on
and off for the next thirty years. In ninety two,
a new oyster bed was discovered on Swamp 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

(19:59):
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 Muse was shot by police after harvesting oysters from

(20:20):
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 that the
the refrain was kind of it is nineteen fifty nine,
we should not be killing people ober oysters. Virginia and
Maryland were at this point already trying to work out

(20:40):
their oyster differences, and so muses death, as Tracy said,
kind of put that into high gear. They started negotiating
in earnest again and eventually a six member by state
commission actually worked out in 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

(21:05):
signed it into law on December five, nineteen sixty two,
at which point then Governors Taus 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

(21:25):
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 twelve Fall Oyster
Survey reported a nine percent survival rate among the state's
oyster population, the highest it has been since nineteen three.

(21:49):
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 makes me
want to naught eat 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

(22:12):
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 I think they're actually working in conjunction with other aquariums,
and a lot of aquariums have banded together to kind

(22:32):
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. Still little think you

(22:52):
should be doing that obviously, But you see, you know
how all these things happened very quickly. Uh money, yep,
kind of all comes down to it. And now I
think you have listener mail. I knew our listener mail
is from Spencer, and it came in an actual envelope

(23:13):
on physical paper, and it's so awesome that you pretty
much scampered over to me as soon as you opened
and I think I did, Spencer, says dear Holly and Tracy.
I recently listened to your episode on Boudica and I
loved it. I thought I would tell you about my
own experience with the Rebellious Queen. I recently spent two
weeks at a camp for the arts and well in Court, Ontario,

(23:36):
where I specialized in stage combat. The first day I
was there, I was thrilled to learn that our final
performance would be on the Celtic rebellion against the Romans
led by Boudica. We began to train with broadswords, daggers, javelins,
spears and hand to hand combat to match with the
Celts and the Romans would have used as best as
we could. We learned Roman marching, celt battle cries, and

(23:59):
even some Latin. On the final day, I was even
covered in Celtic wode and had my hair dyed with
white temper paint to look as much like a Celtic
warrior as I could. Our performance showed a Celtic ambush,
the humiliation of Boudica, the sacking of Londinium, and the
final battle in which the Celts were defeated. In the end, however,

(24:20):
we decided to show Buddhica kill herself, even though it
is disputed what did happen to her. I was so
glad that you had done on an episode. When I
got back that I thought I should write you this letter.
You were a humble Fan spencer. That is the greatest story.
And I want to go to Buddhica Camp. Yeah. That
was Tracy's first reaction when she read it was, I
want to go to Buddica. Came. Could we have Budhica
Camp for grown ups? We will set that up. Yeah,

(24:45):
it would be cool to go to Boudia Camp. Yeah.
I have a friend that's kind of going to Buddhica Camp.
Not at all really, he's going to go to Italy
to study physical theater for two years. I know it's
going away parties this weekend. His name is Aaron. I'm
wishing you will Aaron. So if you would like to
write to us on this or any other subject, you can.

(25:08):
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(25:30):
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