Oyster “pirates” fought pitched battles on the bay with Maryland’s “Oyster Navy” in the 19th century. (Illustration by Schell and Hogan/Harper’s Weekly, 1884)

If this sounds unlikely, rewind 200 years. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, oysters were not a connoisseur’s item, but a national food staple consumed by people of all classes—so common that leftovers were sometimes spread on fields as fertilizer and shells used to build roads and even create new land in the bay. (It’s the foundation for parts of Crisfield and other cities.) In Maryland, they became part of the bedrock of the young state’s economy as local watermen plied the fertile oyster beds with hand tongs, emulating the technique used by Native tribes of the region.

But a trio of new technologies—refrigeration, railroads and canning—emerged in the early to mid-1800s, and oysters exploded in popularity as they became available beyond coastal areas. The bounty of the seemingly inexhaustible Chesapeake caught the notice of distant mariners who had stripped their own waters clean.

“Northerners, who had largely depleted their local oyster beds, looked at those down here like the gold fields of California, and they brought the towed dredge from New England,” Webster says. “That changed everything.”

Pulled behind Chesapeake sailing vessels, the teethed dredges efficiently tore through oyster beds and scooped big loads up to the surface at a rate far exceeding what watermen with tongs could accomplish. Soon the Chesapeake was undergoing a transformation.

As related in historian John R. Wennerstein’s “The Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay,” Maryland passed laws in the mid-1800s against out-of-state oysterers—“plundering Yankee drudgers,” as they were called. And yet the rapacious dredging continued. In 1868, Maryland established a watergoing police force, nicknamed “The Oyster Navy,” to stop unlawful harvesting by oyster pirates.

Pitched gun battles erupted on the bay between the police and the pirates, Webster says. Some vessels carried cannons and rifles, killings were commonplace, and outraged oystermen plotted assassinations of rivals and officials.

Even some Maryland watermen complained of overzealous policing by the navy, which later became the Maryland Natural Resources Police. But with the nation’s hunger for oysters growing, nothing could stop the mayhem, or the enormous harvest.

By the late 1800s, some 15 million bushels of oysters a year were being pulled from the Maryland section of the bay, each holding perhaps 275 oysters. By comparison, this year’s Maryland oyster harvest—the biggest in 35 years, likely thanks to favorable weather—was about 540,000 bushels, or less than 4% of the historical high.

As zoologist and Johns Hopkins University Professor William K. Brooks declared in “The Oyster,” his 1891 natural history of the species written as oyster populations were approaching collapse, “(F)or many years we strove to hide even from ourselves, that our indifference and lack of foresight, and our blind trust in our natural advantages, have brought this grand inheritance to the verge of ruin.”