264 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 



here, oft" and on, for sixty years, and constantly for the past twenty-seven years, near 

 to what were formerly the hnest and most productive oyster-grounds in the State of 

 Georgia, and have been able to observe their rapid exhaustion, and thus nave feared 

 their impending total extinction through improvident fishing. Fifty years ago, when 

 the city of Savannah had a population of about 13,000, and there was no outside demand, 

 the market was readily supplied, without any necessity to resort to tongs or any other 

 implement, and even when ten years later shipments into the interior began to be 

 made, they were rarely employed. 



The shores of the larger creeks, and of the rivers in favorable locations above 

 low-water mark in Chatham and Bryan counties, were lined with " coon • oysters," 

 which supplied the stock for opened or shucked oysters. The bottoms of high water 

 creeks, or such as went dry or nearly so, under favorable circumstances were more or 

 less covered with single oysters, which were gathered by "picking." Sometimes the 

 finest specimens were procured by hand, about a foot deep. This method required no 

 culling, and had the great advantage of involving no disturbance of the empty shells. 



Population having increased and the demand having become greater the beds both 

 above and below low-water mark had commenced to deteriorate, when the enforced 

 rest during the period of the civil war restored them to a greater degree of produc- 

 tiveness. The period of most rapid depletion of the grounds of Chatham and Bryan 

 counties, which had formerly supplied the trade of Savannah, is therefore embraced 

 within the last twenty-seven years. Three years ago all the ledges and banks of coon 

 oysters, other than those at private landings, being in sight and easy of access, had 

 completely disappeared, and the natural beds below low-water mark had decreased in 

 productiveness fully 87£ per cent. The culls of tonged oysters are now used for 

 opening, and for the several years past the trade has had to be supplied from the 

 southern counties and from the less-ravaged beds in South Carolina. In 1880 my sons 

 shipped 1,540 barrels of shell oysters to Philadelphia, but during the next season they 

 were only able to procure 881 barrels with nearly double the number of tongers. 

 About ten years ago I applied to the agent of the Ocean Steamship Company for 

 space in the ship's ice box to send a 2-gallon can of opened oysters as an experiment to 

 New York. He replied it was like sending coals to Newcastle; but since then the 

 trade has greatly increased; a single party who visits Savannah every season for the 

 purpose ships about 13,000 gallons, mostly to Boston, Mass. He has never been able 

 to procure more than half the quantity wanted during the months of November, 

 December, January, and February, and the supply has been decreasing annually. 



Ensign Drake, in Bulletin No. 19 of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, estimates 

 the total area of the public oyster beds at 1,700 acres, and even if he had included 

 the few exhausted beds, which he intentionally omitted in his delineations, it would 

 still be inconsiderable. According to the somewhat incomplete survey, South Carolina 

 has 773 acres, nearly exclusively coon oysters. Lieut. Francis Wiuslow reports 10,165 

 acres in North Carolina, and the oyster commission of Maryland, in their report of 

 1884, quote 123,5150 acres in that State. To have maintained our beds in any satisfac- 

 tory state of productiveness as public oyster beds, would have required the exercise 

 of a high degree of intelligence and the most vigilant care from the start, instead 

 of which they have been constantly ravaged by the most outrageous improvidence of 

 their privileged destroyers, and but for the fact of usually an annual set in our 

 climate, they would have been exterminated in a much shorter period. 



