The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  This arrangement, by assuring the cultivator that he owned all the profits from his labor and investment, provided the necessary incentive to develop an extensive cultivated oyster industry in New York and New Jersey. Organizations such as the Richmond County Oyster-planting Association in Staten Island were formed to patrol the beds and guard against poachers.

  Oystering in natural beds had required relatively little capital or risk. But cultivating oysters was a different kind of business. The investment in labor—buying, transporting, and planting spats and maintaining beds—was substantial. Each spat had a less than one-in-a-million chance of surviving predators, storms, and other maritime conditions. But at least, after the law was passed, no one else could harvest the planted oysters. Cultivation rapidly increased following the passage of this legal guarantee. Soon more than one thousand men were directly employed cultivating oysters in New York City waters.

  Sturdy oak-splint bushel baskets became a standard unit of measure, though a bushel might contain as few as 250 and as many as 350 oysters. A new trade, oyster-basket making, was founded, bending splints of oak or maple to molds.

  By the 1830s, oystering, the single most important economic activity on Staten Island, employed about one thousand people, basket makers and spat shovelers included. Oystermen started coming north with the spats to plant them. Many of these Maryland oystermen were free blacks. But even as free men and women, they found things different in New York.

  New York had never been progressive on the slavery issue, but it had made substantial progress since 1735 when a man named John van Zandt had whipped his slave to death because he had stayed out at night. The coroner’s jury had ruled that the cause of death was not the brutality of the owner but a “visitation from God.” Immediately following the end of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey were the only Northern states that did not abolish slavery or establish a program for gradual abolition. Staten Island and Brooklyn, along with Ulster County, had been particularly vehement in their opposition to the abolition of slavery. But slave labor was being replaced by immigrant labor, which was legally less complicated and just as cheap. After 1799, New York law automatically granted freedom to children born of slaves. By 1820, only 518 slaves lived in New York, mostly in agricultural areas. Finally, a law was passed abolishing slavery in New York State after July 4, 1827. Free blacks moved into an area in northern Manhattan, calling it Seneca Village, where they lived, along with remaining American Indians, in shacks and even caves. But most lived in the poorer sections of Manhattan along with mostly Irish immigrants. Seneca Village was bought up by the city in the 1850s to create Central Park.

  Maryland was still a slave state, but it had an unusually high population of free blacks. The slave-owning establishment believed this population was a threat to the institution of slavery, and so the state passed laws restricting the rights of free blacks. A black oysterman was not allowed to own his own sloop or even captain a sloop unless a white man was present. On the other hand, if he wished to move to an unknown corner of West Africa called Liberia, he would be paid a stipend.

  Restrictions against free blacks owning land in New York had been abolished in 1809, though blacks were still required to own at least $250 worth of property in order to vote. The property requirement had been removed for white people in 1825. In Maryland, free blacks could not own land, they could not own oyster beds, but could only be laborers working on them. In Staten Island, they could work their own oyster beds. They settled into a small community of freed New York blacks, on the far southern tip, the island’s poorest land, in its most rural township. It was part of Westfield, one of the original four Staten Island townships, which had been settled by Dutch and Huguenot families, many of whom had been oystermen. Though the loam was laced with sand and clay, Westfield had farms and freed New York blacks went there for farmwork and oystering. The part of Westfield that Maryland blacks settled in was uncleared wooded land, inexpensively purchased. Though this area lacked the rich soil of the rest of the island, the blacks found the sandy soil well suited to growing strawberries. Originally called Harrisville, then Little Africa, by the 1850s it was called simply Sandy Ground, which is one of the prerequisites for growing strawberries.

  The location was next to the oyster grounds of Arthur Kill on the north side and a short walk to Prince’s Bay to the south. Prince’s Bay oysters were particularly valued in Manhattan. Increasing numbers of blacks from the Maryland and Virginia oyster trade migrated to Sandy Ground. At first it was a poor community. The men worked for white oystermen and the women cleaned and did laundry for white families in Prince’s Bay and Rossville. The black families lived in one-room shacks and built lean-tos for additions when they had children. In the summers they ate the produce from the gardens and in the winter they ate mostly oysters that they raked up from the forgotten deep recesses of Arthur Kill. Oysters are a food that loses charm when it becomes a staple.

  But the little community became increasingly prosperous. Cultivation of strawberries continued, but oystering provided an economic base by which the blacks could thrive with their own shops and craftsmen and churches, becoming completely self-sufficient. They began to own their own boats. Some became basket makers, splitting the local white-oak saplings into strips they soaked and wove into bushel baskets. Others became blacksmiths, making tongs, rakes, and other equipment for oyster skiffs. Farms added to the strawberry crop such Southern foods as collard greens, sweet potatoes, and mustard greens. A boat left New Brunswick, New Jersey, every morning, steaming down the Raritan River and through the Arthur Kill, stopping in villages along the way, including Sandy Ground, picking up produce to be sold at the Washington Market in downtown Manhattan.

  Some Sandy Ground oystermen operated skiffs collecting oysters with the long tongs of Lenape design or oyster rakes. Some earned enough money to buy single-masted sloops. The more affluent oyster families paved one road along the Arthur Kill, Bloomingdale Road, with crushed oyster shells. Starting in 1849, prosperous black oystering families built large, handsome, brick country homes along this road. Some of them traded oysters for bricks to build their homes.

  As one of the first free black communities in New York, Sandy Ground became well known as an African American center. Black New Yorkers moved there from Manhattan at such a rate that despite the Maryland immigration, according to the 1860 census, the majority of Sandy Ground residents in the 1850s had been born in New York City or at least in New York State. It was a prosperous self-sufficient community. Esther Purnell, a woman from one of the Maryland families, established the community’s own private school. It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad that moved escaped slaves north to freedom. Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in 1793, had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to help a slave escape or give him refuge. To the anger of many New Yorkers, the law was further strengthened by Congress in 1850. The skiffs and sloops of Sandy Ground oystermen were regularly searched for runaway slaves.

  But the Staten Island oyster industry was largely integrated. Some white families made their homes in Sandy Ground, and even during the Civil War years, when New York City race relations, never good, grew particularly ugly, with numerous lynchings, the people of Sandy Ground enjoyed a peaceful relationship with the white communities that surrounded them.

  Of all the oyster areas in New York Harbor, the East River was considered the place with the most advanced cultivation techniques. The first commercial practice of seeding a previously prepared bed, planted before spawning season with artificial reefs of oyster shells, occurred in the 1830s in beds surrounding a small East River island in the Bronx, City Island. On a map, the East River appears to become Long Island Sound after the two bodies meet at the narrow opening of Hell Gate, which is why the waters are so rough at this spot. But, by tradition, the narrow eastern stretch with the Bronx on one side and Queens on the other—an area today running past La Guardia Airport and the Throgs Neck Bridge as far as Norwalk, Connec
ticut, on one side, and Port Jefferson, Long Island, on the other—was considered part of the East River. This was a prime oystering area. Charles Mackay wrote of City Island in the 1850s: “In City Island, the whole population, consisting of 400 persons, is employed in the cultivation of oysters. The City Islanders are represented as a very honest, peculiar, and primitive community, who intermarry entirely among themselves, and drive a very flourishing business. The oyster that they rear is a particular favorite.”

  The City Island practice of seeding came from the observation, to quote Ernest Ingersoll’s 1881 government study of the oyster industry, that “any object tossed into the water in summer became covered at once with infant oysters.” Clearly, something could be placed in the water in summertime to collect large numbers of floating young oysters, fingernail-size flakes, which, at very little expense, could be transferred to a bed ideally suited for growing. A variety of objects were used to attract the young swimming oysters, which could then be deposited on oyster-shell beds.

  But the success of the first experiments could not be repeated. The number of attached oysters became fewer and fewer until the oystermen understood that oysters would attach only to certain surfaces. Smooth was all right. They liked bottles. But slimy was unacceptable and slime grew very quickly. Oyster shells at the bottom of the East River became slimy in a matter of days from vegetable matter in the water. To avoid slime the oystermen learned to wait and not spread shells in the beds until the spawning was actually in progress. Instead of planting shells in May in order to be prepared, they did not place them until July. They also looked for fast-running tideways to establish beds because sliming was much slower in such areas. They learned that if they spread the shells with shovels over the side of the skiff rather than just dumping piles overboard, the oysters would grow better.

  By early fall, the East River oystermen would rake up a few shells and look for small flakes on them. Those were the new oysters. At the end of the first and second year, smaller oysters were removed to give larger ones growing space. By the second year they would be the size of a half-dollar, as they used to say when they still had half-dollars. A few third-year oysters were considered small but tender delicacies. Then, after four years, the oysters would be collected. Whether the bed was successful or not, it had to be cleared before it could be used again because the old shells would be too dirty for oysters to attach to them. The oyster dredge, a new and controversial tool, was introduced.

  The fact that there was so much controversy over the oyster dredge demonstrates that the New York oyster fishery, poor as its management was, was far ahead of most fisheries. Virtually the same technique, stern dragging, was raising comparatively little controversy in the fisheries targeting cod, flounder, and other bottom fish until the midtwentieth century. The crisis of overfishing became apparent in oyster beds more than a century before it became apparent in fish stocks.

  Dredging and bottom dragging were first done under sail, but it was the steam engine that made them dangerously efficient. An oyster dredge dragged a heavy bar along the bed with a netting basket behind it. Immediately it was seen that such a device could clear out the ocean floor. Victor Coste vehemently opposed oyster dredges. In an 1858 report to the French emperor Napoléon III, he stated, “Six weeks of daily dragging would be enough to denude the whole coast of France.” The French started calling the oyster dredge the “oyster guillotine.”

  In New York and New Jersey, oystermen regarded dredging, as they did most new technology, with considerable suspicion. In 1820, a New Jersey law in Monmouth County barred taking an oyster on the Navesink River by any means other than “wading in and picking up by hand.” The same year the oyster dredge was completely banned from New Jersey. But by 1846, planted beds were exempted from the ban. Only sail-powered dredging was allowed in Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay until the 1960s. In the East River, dredges were favored because they broke up the oyster-shell mounds and clusters and cleaned out the area, making it ready to plant more clean shells. In 1870, a law prohibited dredging in Long Island’s Great South Bay, but as holdings got larger, in 1893 the law was repealed. Designed as conservation measures, dredge-limiting laws lingered on even after cultivation eliminated the risk of overharvesting because they had a secondary effect of making oystering inefficient and therefore unattractive to big business. In this way oystering was kept a local artisanal industry.

  In the early nineteenth century, growing demand and declining production in New York City created an opportunity for nearby oyster beds. The Great South Bay, a sheltered body of water about twenty miles long and approximately forty-two miles miles wide, was covered with natural oyster and clam beds and was only sixty-five miles from Manhattan.

  In the 1840s, two Dutchmen, Cornelius De Waal and his brother-in-law Cornelius Hage, with wives and four children each, went to New York with the intention of moving to the Michigan frontier, where other Dutchmen had already gone. Pamphlets advertising rich virgin farmland in America had been circulating among the oystermen of the increasingly unproductive natural beds of the Dutch–Belgian coast. The De Waals and the Hages were comforted by what they found to be the Dutchness of New York—Manhattan’s brick mansions with gables and what seemed to them the Dutch style of Brooklyn farms. They were directed to a hotel on Manhattan’s Greenwich Street run by a Dutch Jew. Traveling Dutchmen are always joyous on the rare occasions they find people who speak their language. They talked and talked and heard a rumor that the nearby Great South Bay was full of oysters. Being from Bruinisse in Zeeland, where they had worked in the oyster business, they were excited by this news, and they got directions to Hunter’s Point to catch the Long Island Rail Road.

  At the time Long Island was populated mostly on the North Shore and East End by the descendants of seventeenth-century Puritans who had migrated from Connecticut. They had prospered in fishing and commerce on Long Island Sound, which had kept them clustered around the North Shore. Because the railroad, started in 1835, was built with the intention of connecting to Boston with the help of a ferry from the North Fork to Connecticut, it did not service the Long Island population but cut through the center, through flat woodlands with names such as the Barrens.

  The South Shore was sandy and marshy, not especially good for farming, but it did offer a short sea route to New York City’s markets. Hage and De Waal chose Oakdale, where they could live off the Great South Bay on flat, sandy shoreland that reminded them of home. By 1865, friends and relatives from Holland came and they formed their own community of West Sayville. They cut down trees and started farms and small industry. But the economic heart of the area was the Great South Bay and selling oysters to New York City’s market. That market was so insatiable that the harbor’s huge beds, even with cultivation, could not keep it fully supplied.

  Supplying oysters to the great market only about sixty-five miles away was heavy and dangerous work. The oysters were transported by schooners and wagons. A schooner would carry about seven hundred bushels, about fifty thousand pounds, through Fire Island Inlet at the most dangerous times of year, the R months. The Long Island Rail Road reached Sayville in 1868, and by 1870, some oysters were being shipped by rail. From around 1900 until World War I, the Long Island Express Company had four express oyster trains a day, a seventy-five-minute ride, at 9 A.M., 11 A.M., 2 P.M., and 5 P.M. The oysters were shipped as half shells, three bushels to a barrel, or as “shucked” meats in gallon and three-gallon cans.

  The bay oystermen continued to use the traditional tongs. Each sixteen feet long, they crossed at the end and had metal teeth that worked the bottom in a scissor motion, gathering up oysters, clams, rocks, etc. and depositing them in the baskets attached to each tong. An hour of tonging produced a bushel of oysters. This was the principal activity of the “baymen” along with clamming and fishing for “mossbonkers.”

  In midcentury, the Great South Bay was providing 75 percent of all the clams consumed across the country as well as a large catch of mossbo
nkers, New York City menhaden, to be ground up and used as fertilizer. This was something that had been learned from the Indians. The Indian word for fertilizer was munnawhatteaug, abbreviated by most white men as menhaden, except for New Yorkers, who, from some affliction of articulation, insisted that they were called mossbonkers. After a few years of mossbonker fertilization, the soil on Long Island, Staten Island, and other places it was used began showing signs of deterioration. Also, people in the area complained of the stench of fish and invasions of green flies. Fruit and other produce on which these flies landed were said to acquire the fishy smell.

  Great South Bay oysters were highly valued in New York City, especially after 1817 when they acquired the label Bluepoints. A good marketing name is never unimportant in the oyster business. According to oystering legend, the first oysters sent to the New York market as Bluepoints were shipped by Joseph Avery, a veteran of the War of 1812 who returned home to the Great South Bay in 1815. Typical of baymen of the time, he did some fishing, carted seaweed, sold cord-wood to New York City by way of the Fire Island Inlet, and did some oystering. Avery is credited with being the first to plant seed oysters off of Blue Point, his childhood home. He sailed a sloop to the Chesapeake and brought back a load of seed. According to family lore, during the two years in which he waited for the oysters to grow to a marketable size, Avery patrolled his bed with a loaded musket. He labeled his harvest Bluepoints after his native town by the Islip–Brookhaven line. The town, a traditional oystering center, was named by the oystermen who worked the beds on skiffs and claimed that the point was often seen through a blue haze. Bluepoints became such a successful brand name in New York City that soon any large oysters from the Great South Bay were called Bluepoints.

  By the midnineteenth century, the Great South Bay was also running out of oysters and many baymen began planting Chesapeake spats. Once the Dutch started cultivating, using the two sides of the bay, the fresher side for planting and the saltier side for growing, West Sayville became more of an oyster center than Blue Point. But the oysters, shipped to New York City, were still called Bluepoints because New Yorkers loved Bluepoints.