Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars About this episode 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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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:04 Speaker 01 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:36 Speaker 01 Happy Saturday. Our recent episode on William Firthwell's and Mildred Weeks' Wells reminded me of our very long ago episode on the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars. This episode originally came out August 19, 2013, long enough ago that it is not in a number of podcast players anymore.
2:00 Speaker 01 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 2014 with a goal of restoring the oyster beds in 10 bay tributaries by this year, 2025. A press release from the Chesapeake Bay program in July describes this goal as within reach, with reef construction and seeding complete in nine of the 10 tributaries and the 10th expected to be completed in the near future.
2:44 Speaker 01 So, good news for Chesapeake Bay. Enjoy the episode.
2:50 Speaker 01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:01 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. 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 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 the pearl making, oysters are associated pretty well with luxury, or at least with being a sometimes food. Yeah.
3:43 Speaker 01 They're not for most people something that you eat every day. And that pearl association is a little off 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 can pick your oyster and pop it open and maybe there's a pearl inside. Yeah. And it's a big excitement when people find a pearl. They'd like clap and ring a bell.
4:11 Speaker 01 That is super fun. So. Like with many scarcities, this one is completely manmade. Before the 1800s, 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 1800s, but the strife that we're talking about went on for almost 100 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.
4:53 Speaker 01 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.
5:33 Speaker 01 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 plentiful, full of protein, eaten everywhere. Yeah, pretty easily acquired, too. Yeah. These oysters were also a whole lot bigger than they are today. A market-sized oyster today is at least three inches long, but foot-long oysters were a common sight back then.
6:16 Speaker 01 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, 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."
7:02 Speaker 01 It was indeed quite impactful in a variety of ways. Some 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 can big batches of them in factories and ship them everywhere by railroad, overharvesting immediately became a problem. The dredge was introduced in the late 1700s in New England. And this was actually a big toothy jaw that would scrape up huge numbers of oysters all at the same time, so in one fell swoop. And on top of steeply reducing how much time it took to harvest all those oysters,
7:44 Speaker 01 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 1800s, 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
8:25 Speaker 01 word, meaning "Great Shellfish Bay," oysters were still really abundant. But Virginia, which had claimed 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 Yankee interlopers 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 1800s, 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.
9:10 Speaker 01 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, uh, it was basically a giant oyster rush. People were just swooping right in there to get in on the oyster action.
9:30 Speaker 01 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
10:15 Speaker 01 Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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12:00 Speaker 02 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.
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13:02 Speaker 01 Chrisfield, Maryland, on the eastern shore of the bay, became a nexus of oyster activity. Railroads led out of town. It 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 reached by dredge. By 1872, about 600 oyster vessels were sailing out of Chrisfield.
13:28 Speaker 01 And meanwhile, Baltimore, Maryland, became the capital of oyster canning with more than 100 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 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 1860s, the captain of an oyster dredging ship might make $2,000 a year, which does not sound like much, but the average Maryland income was only $500 a year.
14:10 Speaker 01 And of course, there's a reason it was 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. And oystermen 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 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
14:52 Speaker 01 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. No. 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.
15:34 Speaker 01 The situation was bad enough in Chrisfield that it actually went dry in 1875, 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 force 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.
16:19 Speaker 01 In the middle of all this lawlessness, by the mid-1880s, people were hauling millions of bushels of oysters out of the Chesapeake Bay annually. Fifteen million bushels in 1884 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
17:00 Speaker 01 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 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 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.
17:40 Speaker 01 Coastal towns had to arm themselves, too. By 1871, 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.
18:17 Speaker 01 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 law became known in 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 1860s, 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
19:02 Speaker 01 really there. It was pretty lax. Nobody was really willing to take 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 1868. It was commanded by a man named Hunter Davidson, and he patrolled in a steamboat named Leyla, 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.
19:47 Speaker 01 He would actually use a howitzer to try to sink illegal vessels, and that did sometimes work. And he sent 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 Leyla in the middle of the night on January 28th, 1871, 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.
20:30 Speaker 01 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
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23:00 Speaker 02 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.
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24:01 Speaker 01 The Maryland government added more ships and staff in 1870 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 1871. The dredgers actually began to claim that law enforcement was targeting them unfairly for minor or even nonexistent infractions. And Virginia kind of lagged behind this enforcement effort. A financially strapped state government had sold the three vessels it used for maritime police work in 1875, which left it no real way to enforce any of the laws for several years.
24:42 Speaker 01 By the late 1870s, things were really becoming dire. In 1878, 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 1882 and 1885, 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.
25:27 Speaker 01 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 an attempt to stop the piracy. In his first raid in 1882, 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.
26:07 Speaker 01 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 at that point. Yeah. He got a boost in popularity off of it. He had his cake and ate it, too, I think. He did. That's pretty smart. It only happened once. 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 led after that point weren't nearly as successful, and they actually became the target of ridicule.
26:52 Speaker 01 There was even a comic opera at the Norfolk Academy of Music that was performed about the whole thing on April 3 of 1883 called "Driven from the Seas," or Pirate Dredgers Doom. Although Governor Cameron's administration became kind of a shambles, in March of 1884, 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 61 illicit oyster vessels.
27:33 Speaker 01 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 Mayer. He was a German immigrant and he was killed in 1884. 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.
28:16 Speaker 01 And by the spring of 1894, 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 1890s. There were so many oystermen on the water that they couldn't break even on the hauls 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.
28:59 Speaker 01 A lot of things changed after the turn of the century. In 1906, 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 1920s, the annual oyster yield had dropped from that impressive number of 15 million bushels from the 1880s to a mere 3 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. Tensions continued on and off for the next 30 years.
29:44 Speaker 01 In 1942, 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 engaged in World War II. 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 1959, when a Virginia man named Berkeley Muse 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.
30:27 Speaker 01 The, the, the refrain was kind of, it is 1959, 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 Muse's 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 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 5th, 1962, at which point then-governors
31:08 Speaker 01 Taus of Maryland and Harrison of Virginia met and had a seafood lunch with oysters to celebrate. But unfortunately, the oyster population in the bay has continued to fall, especially following new diseases appearing there in the 1950s and 1960s. And it really bottomed out in the 1980s. Today's harvests of native oysters are less than 1% of what they were at their 1880s peak. However, the 2012 Fall Oyster Survey reported a 93% survival rate among the state's oyster population, the highest it has been since 1983. So things are maybe starting to look up a little for native oysters in the Chesapeake Bay.
31:53 Speaker 01 And also, no one is killing people over them anymore. It kind of makes me want to not eat oysters for a little while. Like, I'm doing my part.
32:03 Speaker 01 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 are eating is sustainably harvested or not, which is pretty cool. I think they're actually working in conjunction with other aquariums. 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,
32:39 Speaker 01 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, obviously, but you see, you know, how these things happen very quickly.
33:00 Speaker 01 Money. Yep. Kind of all comes down to it.
33:07 Speaker 01 Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
33:30 Speaker 01 A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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36:09 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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