Streets Made of Shell, Washington's Oyster Boom

This is believed by Ray Midgett to be a photograph of the J. S. Farren & Co. cannery wharf. The masts of a schooner can be seen in the background, likely hauled out at the Farrow shipyard next to the cannery.

It’s difficult now to imagine the frenzy caused by oysters in the 19th century. New Yorkers each consumed an average of 660 oysters annually. In 1850, Chesapeake Bay alone produced six pounds, six ounces of oysters for every American man, woman, and child.

Oysters were pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried, and scalloped. They were made into soups, patties, and puddings. They were escalloped, fricasseed, pickled, made into pies, and served on toast. It was oysters for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snacks.¹

Why not? Between 1880-85, the price of oysters was less than the cost of meat, poultry, or fish. Much less.²

It was a frenzy of consumption that eventually decimated the oyster beds of Long Island Sound, then Chesapeake Bay.

Before 1890, the oyster fishery of North Carolina was largely a cottage industry. Men tonged for oysters haphazardly as the need arose for food or cash. It was largely a barter economy, oysters exchanged for Indian corn, certainly nothing sufficient to feed the voracious appetite of an industrial cannery.³

Fleets of oystermen from Chesapeake Bay brought with them the technology that had effectively dredged the life out of their own oyster beds. And the machinery developed in the Baltimore canneries processed those dredged oysters with ruthless efficiency.

Oyster schooners berthed on the Washington waterfront, at anchor, and underway. Castle Island to the right.

Aw Shucks: An Archaeological Investigation of a Possible Oyster Fishing Vessel in Washington, North Carolina, Patrick Boyle, 2022

The Business

Tongers used two rakes with long wooden handles, pinned together so they could be levered to scrape oysters from the bottom. It was slow, laborious work that could only be done in relatively shallow water, limiting both production and harm to the oyster beds.

A dredge was like a broad plow drug across the bottom, gathering hundreds of pounds of oysters at a time. The oyster beds could have survived the trauma, but the demand was so intense that the beds were dredged repeatedly without allowing time for populations to recover.

It was thought, despite the evidence of Long Island Sound and Chesapeake Bay, that the oyster beds of North Carolina were endless. The demand for oysters and the machinery of harvesting and processing oysters proved them wrong.

By 1890, oysters were usually steamed and canned if they weren’t offered for sale raw. The oysters were offloaded from schooners at the pier head and bucketed into cars with an iron framework, 6 to 8 feet long. Each car held about 20 bushels of unshucked oysters. Each bushel contained 100 to 150 oysters and weighed from 45 to 60 pounds.⁴

The cars were then run along a track from the wharf to the steam chest, a box anywhere from 15 to 20 feet long, with a door at each end. (The Farren cannery had nearly a mile of track on its property.⁵) The doors were closed and the oysters steamed for about 15 minutes.

When steaming was complete, the boxes were advanced on the track to the shucking shed. Each oyster was pried open with a knife—steaming made it easier to open—then washed in cold water and sent to the filler’s table. At the filler’s table they were placed in cans, weighed, and hermetically sealed. The cans were then put into a cylindrical basket and lowered into the process kettle where they were steamed to kill any germs. Finally, they were cooled in a large vat of cold water and transferred to the labelling and packing department.

The women who did the shucking were mostly Bohemians.⁶

Boys working at the J. S. Farren & Co. cannery, Baltimore, MD 1909

 National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The Bohemians

“Wanted at once 500 to 600 hands, white or colored from 12 years up to work in our canning factory,” the J. S. Farren & Company advertised in the October 28, 1890, edition of the Washington Progress.⁷

To be fair, employing children in dangerous jobs was common practice at the time, although the practice in the cannery business seems egregious. The National Child Labor Committee compiled numerous photographs of abuse around the turn of the century, including several of the J. S. Farren & Company’s oyster cannery in Baltimore.

Despite the advertisement for local labor, the Farren cannery imported Bohemians from Baltimore to staff their first year of operation.⁸

Before it was a lifestyle, Bohemia was an actual place, part of what is now the Czech Republic. But Bohemians weren’t just from Bohemia. It was a generic name that included people from Poland, Hungary, Italy, Dalmatia, and Bohemia. It was common practice to transport foreigners from Baltimore to work in oyster canneries throughout North Carolina, then return them in Spring when the canneries closed.⁹

Predictably, the Washington Progress bemoaned the use of Bohemians but blamed local labor rather than the cannery management’s undercutting wages. “The large majority of laborers of today care nothing further than…to do enough to draw their pay. Many of them will work harder to beat time than he would if he was honest to his employer.”¹⁰

If the Baltimore oyster canneries are an example, mostly young women, from sixteen to twenty-five years old, were employed and almost all of foreign birth.¹¹ Older women and blacks were relatively rare. The steamed oysters were easier to open but the work was exhausting, beginning before dawn and extending well into the night. Many of the young women brought their infants and toddlers with them into the cannery.

Young boy working at the J. S. Farren & Co. cannery, Baltimore, MD 1909

National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

In Washington they were housed in an old school building on Third Street that had been converted into a migrant labor camp for the season, according to David Cecelski, a North Carolina historian.¹²  The Washington Gazette called it a “Bohemian Headquarters.”

“There are 63 quartered in the building which crowds it to its uttermost capacity…The only furniture noticed were trunks or chests with one or two bedsteads. The balance of the sleeping paraphernalia consists of bunks in a continuous row from one end of the room to the other. There are four or five stoves placed about the room….”¹³

The Gazette’s journalist seemed pleased that many of the young girls were surprisingly attractive and many could speak English.

On the front page of the same issue of theGazette, a different opinion was expressed. “The Bohemians are rapidly developing the innate cussedness of their true nature. They are a nuisance in the sections where they are located and the sooner Washington is rid of this very undesirable acquisition to her population the better pleased many of her citizens will be.”

Oyster schooners at a cannery wharf. One looks like a bugeye schooner, the other a sharpie.

Aw Shucks: An Archaeological Investigation of a Possible Oyster Fishing Vessel in Washington, North Carolina, Patrick Boyle, 2022

The Waterfront

In the 1890s, Washington’s waterfront was loud, boisterous, and full of activity. It stunk of oyster shells, fish guts, horse manure, sweat, saw dust, tar and turpentine.

Before dawn, the Farren cannery sounded an awful whistle each morning to wake their workers…and everyone else in town.¹⁴

The docks were full of young black boys who would shuck oysters and serve them on a fish box for a modest fee.¹⁵

Lumber barges, freight schooners, steam boats, and skiffs crowded for space. In November and December 1890, over 28 oyster schooners unloaded their catch on the waterfront, many of them numerous times, with an average layover of around two days.¹⁶ The Farren Company eventually hired a tug to help their schooners more quickly into and away from their berth at the wharf.¹⁷

Oyster houses and saloons were common along the waterfront. A working man could set his beer on the bar and gesture to a waiting oyster shucker. A good shucker could pry open the shells and lay them on the bar faster than a customer could swallow them. The documented record for opening oysters is 100 in 3 minutes, 1 second. When finished, the shells were stacked, counted by the dozen, and the bill totaled, typically no more than pennies.¹⁸

It wasn’t that big a meal. Oysters are mostly water, as much as 89%. There are only about 7 calories in the biggest specimens. “Eating a hundred is scarcely more filling than drinking a quart of beer.”¹⁹

Oysters were an industry, but they were also a cheap food source for the Washington community. Swindell & Fulford’s fish house bought directly from the oyster schooners and sold to residents. Townspeople carried home bags full of oysters they bought at the city dock.²⁰

Crew of an oyster schooner bucketing oysters onto the wharf of a cannery, 1890s.

Aw Shucks: An Archaeological Investigation of a Possible Oyster Fishing Vessel in Washington, North Carolina, Patrick Boyle, 2022

A Tentative Business

The continuance of the Farren cannery was always tenuous. The quantity of oysters harvested varied dramatically year by year. In some years the cannery didn’t operate at all. Storms ravaged the oyster beds in shallow water. The oystermen demanded higher prices. And in May 1895, the man who managed the cannery for J. S. Farren & Co., John Keenan, drank a glass of wine with his wife on their 28th wedding anniversary, went to his room and shot himself in the head.²¹ A month later the cannery was offered for sale.²²

A year later it still hadn’t sold.²³ The company dithered whether to open or dismantle the cannery and move it elsewhere when the Washington Board of Aldermen accepted B. H. Farren’s offer to buy oyster shells to pave the city streets.²⁴

The townspeople were hesitant. The muddy streets of Washington were a trial, certainly, but the smell of mountains of shells piled beside the cannery wasn’t appealing, either. The mayor used physicians to lobby public opinion. It might stink but it would be healthier, the doctors claimed. The city bought 100,000 bushels at one cent per bushel. Apparently, the roads paved with shells were a rough ride for wheeled vehicles (and presumably the bare feet of children) until they were crushed by use.

Oyster shells were a useful byproduct. They surfaced roads and footpaths; filled wharfs, lowlands, and railway embankments; were taken on as ballast by ships who arrived at Washington heavily laden but departed light; slacked, they were used as fertilizer and a component of concrete.²⁵ The J. M. Swindell Company of Washington specialized in grinding oyster shells into chicken grit.²⁶

But the fickle supply of oysters wasn’t the only threat to the cannery’s existence. On the afternoon of September 13, 1900, a fire broke out in the Farren cannery. Some say it started at Brabble’s Oyster Saloon. The waterfront was mostly single-story buildings made of wood, “many of them little more than shacks.”²⁷ The sidewalks were made of weathered planks. The wooden wharfs were soaked with oil. There was always a risk of fire.

By that night the fire had consumed the surrounding buildings on Water Street and both sides of Market Street up to Main Street. It was the worst fire in Washington’s history since the Federal Army’s retreat in April 1864.

It was several years before the cannery was rebuilt, but in December 1902 William Bailey, sleeping off a drunk in Gainor’s fish house, kicked over an oil stove. Besides setting fire to himself and the fish house, he also burned the rebuilt Farren cannery, Brabble’s Oyster Saloon, and Mary Telfair’s restaurant.²⁸

H. B. Farren, then head of the company, decided reluctantly to rebuild, but in June 1905, he put it up for sale again.

“Complete canning house and fine wharf property located at Washington, NC. Lot 150 X 125, improved by two buildings 100 X 40 each. Wharf 60 X 35 (deep water). Steel boiler 150 HP, artesian well. Will sell with or without fixtures.”²⁹

The date of the cannery’s final closure isn’t known, but it is no longer shown on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company’s maps of 1916.³⁰

Washington’s oyster boom peaked in less than ten years. It was dead in less than twenty.

References

1.        The Great Oyster Craze: Why 19th Century Americans Loved Oysters, Michigan State University Campus Archaeology Program, February 23, 2017

2.        Ibid.

3.        Ingersoll, E, The History and Present Condition of the Oyster Industry, United States Bureau of Fisheries, Washington, 1881.

4.        MacKenzie, C.L. Jr., History of Oystering in the United States and Canda, Featuring the Eight Greatest Oyster Estuaries, NOAA Fisheries Scientific Publication Office, MFR 58(4)

5.        Washington Gazette, April 3, 1890: 3.

6.        Ingersoll, E, Ibid: 169.

7.        Washington Progress, October 28, 1890: 3.

8.        Washington Progress, November 4, 1890: 3.

9.        Cecelski, D. A Forgotten People: Bohemian oyster shuckers on NC Coast, July 26, 2024.

10.   Washington Progress, Ibid.

11.  Ingersoll, E., Ibid.

12.  Cecelski, D., Ibid.

13.  Cecelski, D., Ibid.

14.  Boyle, P. J., Aw Shucks: An Archaeological Investigation of a possible Oyster Fishing Vessel in Washington, North Carolina, East North Carolina University, May 2022.

15.  Loy, U.F. and Worthy, P.M. Editors, Washington and the Pamlico, Washington-Beaufort County Bicentennial Commission, 1976.

16.  Derived from Washington Progress reporting of maritime arrivals and departures, June – December 1890.

17.  Washington Progress, December 2, 1890: 3.

18.  Conlin, J., Consider the Oyster, American Heritage Magazine, Volume 31, Issue 2, February/March 1980.

19.  Conlin, J., Ibid.

20.  Loy, U.K. Ibid.

21.  Washington Gazette, May 9, 1895: 3.

22.  Washington Progress, June 25, 1895: 3.

23.  Washington Progress, October 15, 1895: 3.

24.  Washington Progress, March 36, 1896: 2.

25.  MacKenzie, C. L. Jr., Ibid.

26.  Cecelski, D., Of Oysters and Chicken Grit, February 10, 2019.

27.  Loy, U.F. and Worthy, P.M., Ibid.

28.  Washington Progress, December 11, 1902: 3.

29.  Washington Progress, June 1, 1905: 2.

30.  Boyle, P. J., Ibid.