APPENDIX D: 

Oyster Wars: The Historic Fight for the Bay’s Riches

Kimmel, Ross M. “Oyster Wars: The Historic Fight for the Bay’s Riches,” The 

Maryland Natural Resource (2008).
4 v The Maryland Natural Resource v www.dnr.maryland.gov

Gluttony and greed, two of the Seven 

Deadly Sins, nearly eradicated the 

Chesapeake’s oyster beds over 100 

years ago. These same two frailties of human 

nature also coarsened and cheapened the lives of 

many people living on the Bay. The examples of 

the past stand to instruct human behavior today, 

if we but pay attention.

Swift’s “bold man” – whoever that may have 

been – piqued a powerful appetite among 

people everywhere in the world where oysters 

could be had. Archeologists have discovered 

that human consumption of oysters dates at 

least to Neanderthal times. The ancient Greeks 

and Romans relished the bivalve. Huge shell 

middens in the Chesapeake region attest to 

Native Americans’ reliance on this rich source 

of protein. Colonists didn’t consider the oyster 

a delicacy, but a staple.

Until the mid-19th century, the Chesapeake’s 

human population was thin enough so that 

oyster harvesting posed little threat to that hardy 

species of water-filtering shellfish. But with the 

onset of the Industrial Revolution – and better 

methods of food preservation and faster means 

of transportation – it was possible to appease 

widespread human hunger from the bounty of 

the Chesapeake Bay. To the silver mines of the 

American west and well beyond, in the 1880s, 

the Bay supplied nearly one-half the entire 

world’s annual demand for oysters!

As rough and tumble as life was in those 

western mining camps, it only rivaled the 

roughness of life on the Lower Chesapeake, 

especially on the Eastern Shore, during the boom 

days of oyster harvesting. Sadly, avarice got out 

ahead of common sense during the scramble to 

strike it rich mining oysters, and by the end of 

the 19th century, the Bay’s supply was depleted to 

a point from which it has yet to recover.

Following the Civil War, with large amounts 

of capital available, businessmen contrived ways 

to turn the subsistence harvesting of oysters 

into a rapacious industry. John Crisfield, an 

Eastern Shore railroad magnate, gathered some 

investors to quietly acquire land at the southern 

tip of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Crisfield and his 

investors chose a strategic spot around Somers 

Cove to found their oyster empire, a center for 

mass harvesting, packing and selling Bay oysters 

to the world. 

The site commanded the rich oyster beds of 

Tangier Sound, and a new railroad built by the 

investors provided a means of quickly marketing 

oysters. Docks received the daily harvests and 

packing houses employed hundreds of people, 

white and black. All the support industries 

and coarse amusements that went along with 

the boom-town mentality pervaded tidewater 

By Ross M. Kimmel

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

Jonathan Swift, ca.1738

The Historic Fight for the Bay’s Riches

Oyster tongers circa 1880

Oyster Wars
towns supporting the oyster fleet and unsavory 

means sprang up rapidly to soak up the money 

that was being made. The town of Crisfield grew 

quickly, like its American frontier mining camp 

counterparts, into a honky-tonk, brawling 

den of swaggering watermen, prostitutes, 

drunkenness, violence, and quick profits from 

oystering.

“There is no greater disaster than greed.”

 Lao Tzu, ca. 600 B.C.

Competition for oysters led to lawlessness 

on the Chesapeake. First New England 

watermen who had exhausted the oyster beds 

in their local waters sailed into the Chesapeake, 

angering Maryland and Virginia watermen who 

considered the Bay off limits to outsiders. Shots 

were fired, people were killed. Then Maryland 

and Virginia watermen went to war with each 

other. Ultimately watermen from individual 

counties went to war with watermen of rival 

counties, each poaching in the others’ rivers as 

the oyster supplies dwindled.

At the same time, there was a dim awareness 

among government officials that the oyster 

supply just might not last forever. Attempts 

were made from the federal to the local level to 

regulate such things as who could take oysters, 

where and when they could take them, and legal 

harvesting size – things we take for granted today. 

Watermen ignored the law and enforcement 

was impossible 

a n y w a y. Fo r 

o n e t h i n g , 

elected officials 

recognized that 

a n t a g o n i z i n g 

watermen was 

political suicide. 

For another, little 

or no funds were 

a p p r o p r i a t e d 

t o s u p p o r t 

enforcement. The 

rape of the Bay 

continued.

In 1868, three

years after the end of the Civil War, Maryland 

established the forerunner of today’s Natural 

Resources Police – the Maryland Oyster Navy. 

The Oyster Navy’s first commander was Hunter 

Davidson, a Kent Islander and Naval Academy 

graduate. Davidson’s charges were to bring 

order to the lawlessness on the Bay and to 

enforce oyster-harvesting laws. Though he was 

personally equal to the task, his Oyster Navy 

wasn’t. It was out-gunned and out maneuvered 

by watermen at nearly every turn. Davidson gave 

up in the early 1870s, and moved to Paraguay. 

For the next decade or two, the Oyster Navy was 

dominated by political forces sympathetic to the 

oyster industry. The carnage, of both oysters and 

people, continued.

“And the heart of the great ocean sends a 

thrilling pulse through me”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ca. 1850

While the flush times of the oyster boom days 

provided employment for Eastern Shore men 

and women, it was hard work under very rough 

conditions. The roughest conditions, though, 

were out on the water. Watermen were – and still 

are – a tremendously hardy breed that weathered 

extremely cold and wet conditions during the 

harvest season (and heat in the illegal harvest 

season). Weather-beaten and often consumptive, 

watermen lived a bare-knuckled existence. Boat 

captains were so desperate for labor that a form of 

slavery continued on the Bay long after the Civil 

War ended. Captains commonly shanghaied 

crewmen from saloons and flophouses and forced 

them to endure severely deprived conditions 

working the oyster boats. 

Irish, German and Italian immigrants to 

Baltimore were especially vulnerable to this 

temporary form of enslavement, and many 

did not survive the experience. The bodies of 

crewmen who had been “paid off by the boom,” 

that is, swept overboard by a swinging boom after 

an oyster run, washed up on shore or snagged in 

fishing nets regularly.

One particularly well-documented case tells 

of a young German, Otto Mayher, who was 

well-educated but not conversant in English. 

Eager to find employment, he voluntarily signed 

onto an oyster boat with two fellow countrymen. 

Sickened by exposure and over-exhaustion, 

Mayher was severely beaten with a marlin spike, 

hoisted half-naked on the halyards and drenched 

in ice-cold water, strung up by this thumbs, had 

his lower limbs beaten with an iron bar, and 

finally, when he attempted to escape on shore, 

had his neck broken. 

Winter 2008 v 5

File Photo

The Oyster Navy’s first commander was Hunter Davidson, a 

Kent Islander and Naval Academy graduate. Davidson’s charges 

were to bring order to the lawlessness on the Bay and to enforce 

oyster-harvesting laws.

Oyster pirates
6 v The Maryland Natural Resource v www.dnr.maryland.gov

While Mayher’s case helped start reformation 

of the treatment of oyster crews, it wasn’t until 

the availability of cheap and reliable gasoline 

engines to operate oyster dredges in the early 

20th century that the abuse ended. 

The first scientific survey of Chesapeake oyster 

resources was undertaken in 1878 by a young 

U.S. Naval officer named Francis Winslow. 

Sailing on the Maryland Oyster Navy vessel Leila, 

Winslow was able to demonstrate scientifically 

that oysters were being taken from the Bay at a 

rate greater than natural replenishment could 

replace. His warnings, however, went largely 

unheeded.

“It is the spirit and not the form of law that 

keeps justice alive”

 Earl Warren, ca. 1955

Countervailing social forces mitigated, at 

least a little, the piracy and lewdness wrought 

by the Oyster Wars. Methodism was a firmly 

ingrained religious tradition on the Eastern 

Shore, and Methodist missionaries sought to 

bring Godliness to the pirates, largely without 

success. Vigilantism also sought to stem oyster 

piracy, with fortifications and artillery brought 

to bear by citizens against poachers. The still 

undermanned and inadequately supplied 

Oyster Navy fought pitched sea battles with 

pirates, using rifles, shotguns, and even cannon. 

And although the outrages of oyster pirates 

were turning public opinion in favor of law 

enforcement, the final shots of the Oyster Wars 

would not be fired until the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the depletion of the Chesapeake 

Bay oyster supply became palpable. From a 

harvest of 15 million bushels in 1884, the 

number declined by over a third in a mere five 

years! After some frustrating rivalry, Maryland 

and Virginia authorities began to cooperate 

before the turn of the 20th century. Under new 

leadership, and with increased support from 

the state legislature, the Maryland Oyster Navy 

began to become a force to be reckoned with 

by 1900.

Though much has been accomplished in the 

past century, the depletion of the Chesapeake’s 

seafood resources is a continuing problem. 

While the outrageous behavior of the oyster 

pirates has been stemmed, other complex forces 

operate on the Bay’s dynamics. Pollution, overharvesting, siltation and the impact of pleasure 

boating all present today’s generation 

of Bay residents with challenges no less 

threatening than those of the Oyster 

Wars. Does the good in human nature 

have the power to vanquish the bad? 

Time will tell. v

This article is based upon John R. 

Wennersten’s book The Oyster Wars of 

the Chesapeake, published in 1981 

by Tidewater Press in Centreville, MD 

— a must read for anyone interested in 

learning more about the largely unknown, 

but crucial, episode of the Oyster Wars in 

Maryland history.

Ross Kimmel is the state-wide historian 

for the Maryland Park Service, and has 

been with the department for 33 years. 

During his tenure he helped found the 

Resident-Curatorship program to help 

preserve historic properties. He also 

chaired the Maryland Forestry and Parks 

Centennial Committee. 

The Mariners’ Museum, in Newport 

News, Virginia, graciously provided the 

historic illustrations for this article. Visit 

their website at www.mariner.org to 

learn more about them.

ABOVE: Oyster pirates dredging at night.

BELOW: Dredging for oysters on the 

Chesapeake Bay, hard work for hard men.