Maryland, Talbot County, St Michaels
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Chesapeake waterman used all these tools to harvest oysters. This hardware tells a story of human ingenuity and greed.
Chesapeake waterman used all these tools to harvest oysters. This hardware tells a story of human ingenuity and greed.Hand tongs, in use since the early 1700s, extended human reach to oysters too deep to gather by hand. A hundred years later, dredges—so efficient they had already scraped clean the oyster bars in Long Island Sound—arrived on the Bay from New England. But still some oysters remained too deep for tonging and legally off-limits to dredges. With the invention of mechanical patent tongs in 1887, oystermen harvested these protected oysters too.
To learn more about the depletion of the Chesapeake oysters and the men who used these tools, visit the Oystering on the Chesapeake exhibit.
(Industry & Commerce) Includes location, directions, 5 photos, GPS coordinates, map.