Schooners from Maryland, 

 Virginia. Delaware and New Jersey 

 stormed the state's oyster beds. As 

 many as 50 Chesapeake schooners 

 could be seen in Pamlico Sound at a 

 single glance. They overwhelmed the 

 oyster beds in number, but also 

 introduced oyster dredges and longer, 

 sturdier tongs into the local oyster 

 industry. The new gear opened up the 

 deepest waters of Pamlico Sound to 

 oystering for the first time. 



The boom brought new life to 

 coastal villages. Waterfront streets 

 thronged with local laborers, Chesa- 

 peake oystermen and "Bohemian" 

 oyster shuckers — eastern European 

 immigrants recruited from Baltimore 

 ghettos. According to Kathleen Carter, 

 a historian at High Point University 

 and the leading authority on the oyster 

 boom, Elizabeth City alone boasted at 

 least 1 1 canneries with 1,700 workers 

 in 1890. 



"It was a jolly time — a new 

 revelation," wrote the Economist- 

 Falcon, an Elizabeth City newspaper. 

 "Population and money followed in 

 perpetual stream. New people, new 

 faces, new ways, new manners .... 

 The song of the oyster shucker was 

 heard in the land." The streets of 

 coastal towns would be paved, 

 literally, with oyster shells. 



Prosperity bred controversy. 

 Tempers flared between local tongers 

 and Chesapeake dredgers. Reports of 

 oyster poaching, smuggling and 

 fraudulent leases were widespread. To 

 conserve the rocks, the General 

 Assembly prohibited oyster dredging 

 after the 1 890 season, but many 

 Chesapeake oystermen refused to heed 

 the law. In 1891, the governor sent the 

 Pasquotank militia, armed with a 

 howitzer, to prevent Chesapeake 

 "pirates" from oyster dredging. 



Local oystermen also protested 

 the monopoly held by the Chesapeake 

 Bay companies. They did not want 

 North Carolina to follow in the 

 footsteps of the Chesapeake industry, 

 which was, shellfish commissioner 



W.H. Lucas warned in 1893, "in the 

 hands of the large corporations, and 

 the oystermen are nothing more than 

 slaves in the employ of said large 

 syndicates." 



The Chesapeake canneries moved 

 south to the Gulf of Mexico when they 

 were finally stopped from oyster 

 dredging. The number of canneries 

 fell to two by 1898, but the oyster 

 boom continued as 16 establishments 

 packed raw oysters on ice. Belhaven, 

 Elizabeth City, Oriental, New Bern, 

 Beaufort, Davis Shore and Morehead 

 City all had packing houses. 



The Carolina coast was soon 

 depleted. This hurt the poor first. A 

 10-acre leasing system helped prevent 

 big companies from monopolizing 

 oyster beds, and it took the beds out of 

 the public domain and put them into 

 private hands. In 1911, Jordan 

 Carawan of Mesic expressed a 

 common sentiment. He petitioned the 

 General Assembly, arguing that the 

 leasing system "deprives poor people 

 of oysters to eat and catch for a 

 living." 



The oyster boom also took a 

 heavy toll on oystermen and oyster 

 shuckers. Spurred by the new markets, 

 oystermen worked through frigid 

 winters in small, open skiffs and often 

 spent weeks living in remote, wind- 

 swept camps. "The injury to health 

 from exposure is so great that few 

 ever reach old age," Ernest Ingersoll, a 

 fishery biologist, observed. Oyster 

 shuckers, mainly women and children, 

 had it no easier. Many a coastal 

 youngster would have one ardent hope 

 — to grow up and earn enough money 

 to get mama out of the oyster house. 



By 1 909, the boom was over. It 

 had peaked in the winter of 1898-99, 

 when Carolina oystermen harvested 

 2.45 million bushels. By 1906, state 

 geologist Joseph Pratt was already 

 reporting a 50 percent decline in 

 oyster harvests over the previous five 

 years. It was the beginning of a long 

 downward spiral for the state's oyster 

 catches. From 1890 to 1908, the 



industry had gathered more than 4 

 million pounds of shucked meat 

 every year. From 1 920 to 1 960, a 

 good annual harvest fell to 1 .5 

 million pounds. From 1960 to 1990, 

 500,000 pounds was a good year. 

 Last winter, our watermen gathered 

 only 228,485 pounds, and our busiest 

 packing houses shucked oysters 

 trucked from Texas and Louisiana. 



Ecological changes since 1960 

 have made it difficult for oysters to 

 recover from decades of overharvest- 

 ing. As filter feeders, oysters are 

 notoriously sensitive to water quality, 

 and estuarine pollutants have risen 

 dramatically in recent decades. 

 Oysters are also highly sensitive to 

 changes in salinity levels. The 

 drainage of coastal wetlands for 

 farming and timber, in particular, has 

 increased freshwater runoff into our 

 estuaries, tainting many of the great 

 oyster bays. In addition, since the late 

 1980s, our waters have been invaded 

 by diseases that, while harmless to 

 humans, have proven catastrophic to 

 oysters. 



The North Carolina oyster boom 

 offers abundant lessons about fishery 

 management and conservation. I'm 

 sure I don't need to point them out. 

 But I do want to say that a century 

 ago, not even the most pessimistic 

 forecaster could have imagined our 

 coast without oysters. Now oystering 

 has almost vanished — and we have 

 nobody to blame but ourselves. I'm 

 not giving up on the Mill Creek 

 oyster festival: I'll continue to go and 

 look, hope against hope, for Newport 

 River oysters. □ 



David Cecelski is a historian at 



the University of 

 North Carolina- 

 Chapel Hill's 

 Southern Oral 

 History Program 

 and a regular 

 columnist for 

 Coastwatch. 



24 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1996 



COASTWATCH 



