SYMHC Classics: Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars

This 2013 episode covers the years after the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War when the oyster supply became so scarce that people turned to oyster piracy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:26):
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

(00:49):
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.

(01:11):
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.

(01:33):
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,

(01:56):
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

(02:19):
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.

(02:44):
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

(03:07):
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

(03:27):
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,

(03:51):
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

(04:14):
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

(04:36):
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,

(04:56):
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

(05:19):
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

(05:39):
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,

(06:03):
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

(06:25):
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

(06:45):
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

(07:08):
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

(07:29):
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

(07:50):
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

(08:11):
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

(08:32):
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.

(08:58):
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,

(09:18):
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

(09:41):
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

(10:04):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:49):
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

(11:12):
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,

(11:36):
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

(11:57):
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

(12:18):
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

(12:40):
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.

(13:02):
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.

(13:26):
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

(13:46):
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,

(14:10):
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,

(14:33):
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

(14:54):
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

(15:16):
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

(15:37):
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

(15:59):
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

(16:22):
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,

(16:44):
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

(17:04):
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

(17:24):
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

(17:46):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:27):
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

(18:50):
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

(19:14):
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

(19:36):
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

(19:57):
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

(20:19):
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,

(20:41):
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.

(21:05):
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

(21:27):
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

(21:51):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:36):
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

(22:56):
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

(23:18):
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

(23:40):
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

(24:01):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:44):
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