Oyster Farming Vs. Oyster Hunting

Merrill Leffler

Seventy-five years ago, Maryland seemed at the dawn of an oyster revolution. Business would never again be the same was the optimists' prediction: oyster farming was going to reverse what were then plummeting harvests–even barren, underwater deserts would bloom with oysters.

Today, of 9,000 acres under lease in Maryland, a mere 1,000 are actively cultivated. To opponents of aquaculture, the poor showing of private planting is proof of how oyster aquaculture in the Chesapeake Bay has failed. To proponents of aquaculture, that poor showing is an indication of how opposition has successfully hamstrung a viable industry in Maryland. One consequence of this conflict is that startup costs for an aquaculturist today are considerably greater than if an oyster farming industry had been cultivating grounds over the last century.

Legacy of the Past

Opposition to private oyster planting in the state seems especially ironic since Maryland was among the first states to recognize the value of leased grounds. As early as 1830, the Maryland General Assembly passed leasing legislation that allowed citizens one acre of bottom ground for planting and growing shellfish.

Although the law made it a misdemeanor for anyone but the leaseholder to harvest oysters from those planted grounds, few made the attempt to cultivate oysters since enforcement was virtually nonexistent.

Early on in the 19th century, oyster grounds in the New England states had already been fished out. That was warning enough for Marylanders, and by mid-century the state and several Eastern Shore counties acted to prevent oyster bars against unrestricted harvesting: from a statewide licensing system in 1865 to seasonal restrictions to gear limitations (for example, the prohibiting of steamboats or steam machinery for harvesting).

The General Assembly also passed a bill to increase the one-acre leasing provision to five acres, a law notable for distinguishing natural oyster beds, which could not be leased, from barren grounds, which could be. But oyster stocks seemed infinite then, and most who took advantage of the new law did not plant oysters but used the grounds for bedding their catch from public bars until they could get better market prices.

Meanwhile, the boom was on. Watermen were tonging, dredging and scraping over 10 million bushels of oysters a year out of the Bay and its tributaries. Still, despite the nearly inexhaustible stocks, there were some who looked to the future and worried about what they saw: the continual depletion of the Chesapeake's greatest resource.

That worry seemed to be confirmed in 1875, when harvests dropped from 14 million bushels to 10, a decline that prompted the General Assembly to call for an assessment of the state's oyster reserves.

Over the following two years, Lieutenant Francis Winslow of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey carried out an intensive study of oyster beds in Pocomoke Sound and Tangier Island. He found oyster stocks well depleted from the previous thirty years and strongly recommended the state to lease large tracts of Bay grounds in order to encourage private oyster farming. He also urged the state to establish an oyster commission to oversee management of the oyster fishery.

William K. Brooks became a member of that first commission. A Johns Hopkins professor and the foremost oyster biologist of his day, Brooks became an indefatigable supporter of oyster aquaculture as the only way to protect Maryland's oyster against destruction. In The Oyster, a book he published in 1891, he took the strongest stand against the public fishery.

"It is a well-known fact that our public beds have been brought to the verge of ruin by the men who fish them," he wrote, adding bleakly, "all who are familiar with the subject have long been aware that our present system can have only one result -- extermination."

To most
Maryland watermen,
the thought of
Bay waters
in private hands
was outrageous.

But as harvests went down at the turn of the century and packing houses by the score went broke, demands for state action increased; action that would not only protect oyster beds–for example, through enforcement of cull and gear laws–but that would enhance production through leasing. The demands became so heated that even strong Tidewater opposition could not cool passage of the Haman Oyster Act in 1906, the most far-reaching attempt in Maryland to alter the oyster industry.

Haman's bill allowed private planters to lease 30 acres in the tributaries, 100 acres in Tangier Sound and 500 acres in the Bay's open waters.

While amendments in succeeding years would, according to an editorial in the Baltimore Sun, "emasculate its effectiveness," that act is still the basis for oyster farming in the state today.

B. Howard Haman was a Baltimore lawyer and a man driven by the belief that private leasing would help the state recover its lead as the world's major producer of oysters. And he was convinced leasing would benefit the very oystermen who spurned such help.

Haman was salesman and prophet, as he stumped the state for his bill, seeking support from farmers in Montgomery County and Westminster, the Chamber of Commerce in Baltimore, and even watermen in the "hostile" territory of the Eastern Shore. Like the ancient mariner, he cornered anyone willing to listen and often those who were not.

To farmers in the western part of state, he spoke a language they could understand. Wheat yielded about seven million bushels in 1890-91, he said, while oysters, which no man had sown, yielded ten million bushels. Imagine, he said, what those underwater farms could produce when cultivated by oyster farmers.

Most watermen remained unconvinced and bitter. At the heart of their opposition was the fear of losing independence, of becoming hired hands for large industry. Oyster catchers, after all, were men who sailed when they pleased and took what they wanted–theirs, they believed, were "ancient privileges" and "common law rights." The Oystermen's Protective Association of Somerset County, for example, referred to "the public right of the fishery."

Haman, raised on the Eastern Shore in Kent County, was well aware of the fear of big business. His bill prohibited any corporation as lessee or assignee of oyster bottom. The majority of watermen did not believe that industry could be kept out then, nor do they today. Larry Simns, president of the Maryland Waterman's Association, points out that if a natural disaster hits an area of the Bay, it could wipe out small leaseholds. "The only people that could really lease on a large scale would be a big company. They would come in and take over because a small man would get wiped out and couldn't recoup. "

Watermen also rejected the state's definition of barren bottom. To distinguish natural bars, or rocks, from barren ground, Haman's bill followed Brooks' recommendation for a survey of all natural oyster bottom. That survey was to become the most rigorous in the United States, taking six years to complete. Oystermen countered that the charts distinguishing public bars from barren grounds meant little–one year's barren bottom, they claimed, could be next year's productive bar as a result of shifting bottom grounds and natural replenishment.

Though the Haman Oyster Act became law, the crippling amendments which came over the next several years could only discourage farmers from risking investment. For example, state regulations favoring the reseeding of public bars virtually prevented the sale of Maryland oyster seed to leaseholders, which meant planters had to go to Virginia to buy seed. In addition, oyster farmers were not allowed to harvest their grounds with dredges but were required to use tongs, a regulation that was lifted only in recent years. An editorialist in the Evening Sun commented, "This is like compelling the lessee of a potato patch to pick up potatoes one by one instead of using a spade."

Poaching is a
significant threat
to Maryland
oyster farmers:
"If you can't watch it,
it's hard to keep it."

Success and Failure

Despite the powerful resistance to private leasing, some watermen still bought up leases, in the Nanticoke, the Wicomico, the Potomac and other tributaries to the Bay. And it was this surge of leasing that accounted for the premature optimism voiced in the period's newspapers. Yet, even the several thousand acres of leased ground came under constant attack–private oyster lands were like the call to a showdown that pitted oystermen against planters. As Brooks had observed fifteen years earlier, "The most serious obstacle to the development of a great planting industry in Maryland is the absence of all respect for private property in oysters."

A range war had come to the Chesapeake Bay. "Antiplanters at it Again: Oyster Boats Swoop Down on Honga River" reads one headline, another decries a raid in 1912 by a Somerset dredger on a leased bar in the Manokin River. There was little respect for leased bottom rights, and there were too few Oyster Police to cover Maryland's 2,000 square miles of Bay water.

On the other hand, planters in the Nanticoke River got together some years back and were able to cut down on oyster poaching. They bought a radar-operated boat to protect their grounds, and according to local planter Harold Kennerly, "it wasn't until we got some strong convictions that we broke it up. "The problem, says Kennerly, was with oystermen from other counties. "Having your own land, as many do here, makes you respect somebody else's land."

Despite the long-standing Maryland legislation that authorizes leasing, state support has gone toward conserving and rehabilitating public bars, through shell and seed planting programs, regulations that set minimum legal catch sizes, limits to harvests and restrictions on the kind of gear oystermen can use. And that support, many feel, has helped keep annual harvests on the public bars between two and three million bushels a year, until disease in the last several years reduced harvests to one million bushels.

Some critics of the state's nearly exclusive emphasis on public bars continue to argue there is room, if not necessity, for both; that private leasing, as Haman once argued, would benefit watermen and could only help the Bay's public oyster stocks.

"Rather than cutting off your independence," says one leaseholder, "you're better able to control your own destiny–you're not worried about someone * coming in and cleaning out your bed." Eddie Higgins thinks every waterman ought to have at least ten acres–"you can bed oysters from public bars if the market isn't good enough, and in rough weather you can work them more easily, since most of those grounds will be in the tributaries." Kenneth Lappe, an oysterman who only began farming his leased grounds in the last few years, says, "When you're planting the oysters yourself, you don't have to just depend on Mother Nature to do it, you're going to take care of them with her."

"For every bushel of seed oysters a private man buys and puts in the river," he says, "it helps everybody that harvests oysters on these public beds. You're creating spatfall. . . and spat don't know boundaries."

But what one man supports, another rejects. Larry Simns says the Waterman's Association recognizes there is a need for some leased bottom and that it can be beneficial to the industry; but, he says, "We've proved that we survived better by being a public rock system than when you get private enterprise taking over large tracts of bottom."

For nearly a century, traditional watermen have held firm against expansion. They have been so influential that between 1952 and 1973 six Eastern Shore counties, with a combined 479,000 acres of barren grounds, prohibited the Department of Natural Resources from leasing any new grounds for oyster farming.

"For every bushel
of seed oysters
a private man buys
and puts in the river,
it helps everybody that harvests oysters on these public beds.
You're creating spatfall... and spat don't know boundaries. "

Long years of opposition to oyster growers hampered development of hatcheries and seed areas, and seed remains too scarce on both public and private grounds. This shortage has proven especially troublesome for oyster farmers since seed oysters raised on public grounds cannot be sold to private planters until one million bushels have been moved to public bars, something that one cynic says is as likely to occur as snow in summer. There is just not enough natural production in Maryland's portion of the Bay to sustain a consistent fishery. And unlike Virginia, Maryland restricts the size of leaseholds and the sale of small oysters, making it unprofitable for private growers to attempt to raise seed oysters on leased grounds.

The warnings of a century ago that Chesapeake Bay oysters faced a dim future have not yet come to pass. Though the oyster is much diminished, it does not yet appear to be endangered. In part, Brooks and his followers may have underestimated the resilience of the American oyster and the various management policies to protect against overfishing.

Nevertheless, if the fishery is to rebound, nature may need assistance not only from the state but from the private oyster farmer as well. There are some tentative signs that attitudes among traditional opponents are changing. Larry Simns says, "Most watermen agree that if they had two or three leased acres, it would be beneficial to them some time. If the 9,000 acres is used up, then we'd look at whether more should be available or not."

And at a meeting in Annapolis, Harold Kennerly tells of a discussion among some watermen about putting a cap on the number of acres that could be leased. One objected, "Suppose we want to lease some bottom?" One waterman said, "It's unfair to put a cap because that means we can't lease it. " Kennerly thinks "there are a lot of watermen that are beginning to know the value of leased ground."

To what extent that acceptance will occur remains to be seen–if the past century of failed efforts is any indication, the odds are against the growth of a private oyster fishery in Maryland. But if harvests continue on their downward decline and some means are found for developing oysters more resistant to disease, interest among those opposed to oyster farming could, after a century, begin to change.

From Merrill Leffler, "A Century of Conflict: Oyster Farming Vs. Oyster Hunting," Maryland Sea Grant Magazine, Volume 8, No. 2 (Fall 1987), pp. 2-6.