doubt, however, that literally tons of 
oysters were consumed after gold was 
struck in California. San Francisco 
Bay was stripped bare first. And so 
the devastation went, on up the coast. 
Puget Sound was the most remote 
source and held out longest. 
At the turn of the century, whole 
communities of oyster folk lived and 
worked on float houses in the tidal 
inlets of southern Puget Sound near 
Olympia. Steamers came daily to Mud 
Bay, Oyster Bay, and Little Skookum 
to pick up sacks of Olympias. To fill 
those sacks, oystermen and their fam- 
ilies worked through the night, when 
the tide was usually out and the oysters 
could be raked from the mud flats. 
Cora G. Chase spent part of her 
childhood, from 1898 to 1914, on a 
float house in Oyster Bay. In a mem- 
oir, written as a research paper at 
the University of Washington in 1944, 
she interviewed one of the pioneer oys- 
termen, Dick Helser, an old neighbor 
at Oyster Bay: 
He worked his own bed in the early days, 
getting up at night according to the tides, 
raking oysters in windrows around a float 
that had been staked out when the tide 
was in. then forked them up into the 
float by lantern light. In the gray of cold 
winter mornings the loaded float was 
“poled” to the culling house anchored 
some distance from shore. There the oys- 
ters were forked into a sink float, an 
upside-down float holding two feet of 
water to keep the oysters fresh. 
From the sinkfloat they were forked 
into a w heelbarrow, rolled into the culling 
house, up a plank and dumped onto the 
culling table. All day long the cullers 
sorted out the larger oysters, knocking 
off barnacles, smaller oysters and debris 
Olys are shucked with a special scaled-down oyster knife 
with a culling iron (a thin piece of metal 
easily grasped) and dropping the mar- 
ketable oysters into a five-gallon kerosene 
can, then raking the cullings down the 
hopper at the edge of the table. 
Cheap child and nonwhite labor 
kept the barnacles and oyster shells 
flying and filled the sacks with pre- 
cious mature Olympias. Many hands, 
chilly from long days and nights of 
dull work in the damp and cold, made 
rapid work of the depletion of Wash- 
ington’s natural oyster beds. By the 
nineties, it was necessary to construct 
artificial beds, diked so that water 
would shelter the seeded oysters from 
extremes of heat and cold. Chinese 
did the work for ten cents an hour. 
Today, it costs 512,000 to construct 
an acre of oyster beds, according to 
Vivian Ellison Bower of Ellison’s Oys- 
ter Company outside Olympia. At that 
price, no one is building new beds 
for Olympias anymore. In fact, almost 
no one is even seeding the old beds 
anymore. “Everyone’s given up,” says 
Mrs. Bower. “It’s all hand labor and 
takes four years.” 
Olympias mature slowly and never 
get very large. Inevitably, they have 
lost out to the larger Pacific oysters. 
The decline has gone so far that it 
is virtually impossible to taste an Oly 
without going to Olympia itself, and 
even there the line of supply is very 
thin. 
The only restaurant in town (and 
probably the only restaurant in the 
world) that makes a practice of serving 
Olympias is the historic Olympia Oys- 
ter House. On one of the walls is a 
framed menu from 1921 listing an 
Olympia oyster stew for 30 cents. To- 
day the restaurant’s menu still lists 
Olympias but gives no price. Instead, 
in parentheses, it warns that “market” 
will determine the cost of the oysters, 
“when available.” 
“We used to ship them fresh any- 
where,” the manager told me. “Now 
we buy a gallon or two at a time.” 
For a plate of crisply fried, breaded 
Olympias I paid SI 6.95, which was 
fair enough for so rare an item. But 
all that breading and cooking had ef- 
fectively removed too much of the 
oysters’ essential flavor for me to get 
a true impression of their taste. I 
wanted freshly opened Olympias on 
the half shell, but the Olympia Oyster 
House bought them already shucked 
from a supplier. 
Of the several oyster companies in 
the Olympia area, only two process 
Olympias. The Olympia Oyster Com- 
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