Pages tagged History
Hilton Head
Shell Ring Oyster Company's hand-tumbled singles from Port Royal Sound, served at Hudson's, a restaurant built on the shells of a 1912 oyster factory.
Smoky Bay
An Eyre Peninsula bay where Selwyn "Kiwi" Evans started oyster farming in 1988 during a rural recession. Thirty years on it had about 19 oyster operations.
Tillamook Bay
Where Jesse Hayes planted Japanese oyster seed in 1928, starting Oregon's Pacific oyster farming. His grandson, also Jesse, runs Hayes Oyster Company.
Venice Lagoon
Where a Roman villa kept oysters in a brick-and-wood tank in the first century AD. Nine farms now grow oysters in the Veneto, at Caorle, Chioggia and the Po Delta.
The Shucking Houses
A museum at Solomons, the last full-time shucking house at Kent Narrows, and a cannery island in South Carolina: three places where oysters were an industry before they were a delicacy.
Colchester Native
The Colne's flat oyster, held by the borough of Colchester since 1189, celebrated at an annual feast, and now at the heart of England's largest native oyster restoration.
Jersey
From a nineteenth-century oyster boom that built Gorey harbor to modern Pacific oysters hardened on flats the tide leaves dry for half the day.
Moreton Bay
The bay outside Brisbane where oysters fed the Quandamooka people for thousands of years, then fueled a colonial boom that peaked in 1891.
Sapelo Island
Once part of one of the world's great oyster coasts, then almost empty of oysters. Georgia's marsh country around Sapelo is growing them again.
Wallis Lake
A large coastal lake on the NSW mid-north coast, famous for Sydney rock oysters, and for the 1997 outbreak that changed how Australia manages oyster water.
Drakes Bay (Archival)
Once one of California's largest oyster farms, inside a national seashore. It closed at the end of 2014 after a long fight over wilderness. No Drakes Bay oysters exist today.
James River
The low-salt river that supplied seed oysters to Virginia's growers for generations, and whose oysters, pushed upriver by drought, helped the Jamestown colonists survive.
Lynnhaven
The Virginia Beach river whose oysters once reached presidents' tables. Condemned for shellfish in 2006, it is now more than half open, and nearly all its oysters are farmed.
Willapa Bay
The estuary that shipped oysters to the forty-niners and now supplies around 70% of Washington's oysters. Big, working-bay Pacific oysters with a long history.
What Ancient Oyster Heaps Reveal
A Florida mound of 20 to 30 million oysters, harvests that lasted millennia, and a parasite snail that shows people once skipped summer oysters.
How Japan Saved French Oysters
More than five billion Japanese spat, 562 metric tons of Canadian broodstock, and a debt France repaid after the 2011 tsunami. The rescue behind every French cupped oyster.
The Real Origins of Baked Oyster Classics
A secret sauce with no spinach, a hotel manager's name that changed on the way to Australia, and a dish on a menu a year before its 'inventor' created it. The record behind four classics.
The Chesapeake Oyster Wars
Police gunboats, oyster pirates and a law that kept sail alive: the century-long fight over Chesapeake oysters, and the harvest data that shows what it cost.
Oysters in 17th-Century Art
From Antwerp banquet tables to Leiden bedrooms: four 17th-century paintings of oysters, and what their first viewers would have read in them.
Hemingway's Portugaises
The oysters Hemingway ate in A Moveable Feast were Portuguese oysters. Within fifty years a virus had wiped them out of France.
The Diseases That Redrew the Oyster Map
Why the Chesapeake lost its oysters, France lost two species in a decade, and Australian farms fear summer. Four diseases, and what they changed on the plate.
Scotland's Seabed Machine: The Oyster Wave Converter
A 200-metric-ton hinged flap bolted to the Orkney seabed made electricity from waves for six years. The technology worked, but the money ran out.
The Vernissage and the Shell
From de Heem and Chardin to Manet's 1869 Salon picture and today's art-fair previews, oysters keep turning up in the art world, on the canvas and around it.
The City That Ran on Oysters
Before the skyscrapers and the subway, New York was an oyster city. Some 350 square miles of beds ran beneath its harbor until the last closed in 1927.
Casanova's Fifty
The famous fifty-oyster breakfast has no source. The oyster game in Casanova's memoirs does: Rome, 1771, a hundred oysters shipped from Venice.
Cotuit
One of America's oldest oyster brands, from a Cape Cod bay where oysters once went by wagon and rail to Boston and New York.
Pemaquid
One of the first Maine oysters on the market, grown since 1986 on hard, high-current bottom in the Damariscotta River.
Wellfleet
Cape Cod's oyster town since Champlain named its harbor after oysters in 1606. Farmed grants, a wild fishery, and a festival every October.
Copps Island
Long Island Sound oysters from beds sheltered by the Norwalk Islands, farmed by a family whose predecessors once controlled 22,000 acres of Connecticut shellfish ground.
Blue Point
The Great South Bay name that became shorthand for any Eastern oyster. What a 1908 law said, and where most 'Blue Points' come from now.
Malpeque
The Prince Edward Island oyster judged the world's tastiest in Paris in 1900, and the bay that gave its name to an oyster disease.