Marsh Rabbits

The residents of Maryland’s Eastern Shore are a pragmatic bunch, especially when it comes to what they put in their mouths. Isolated from the rest of Maryland and Virginia by the rumpled expanse of the Chesapeake, traditions die hard here, largely unmolested by the aggressive grasp of invading high-tech modernity. Up until the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952, it took a concerted effort and a ferry trip to arrive in the marshy flatlands, punctuated by peeling-paint communities and sagging colonial manses. People mostly lived as they had for a hundred, two hundred years, farming, fishing, and supplementing their diet with what the land could provide when the money hidden in the Chock Full O’ Nuts can ran low.

There are plenty of places on the Eastern Shore where these hardscrabble ‘foodways’ persist, sometimes because of seclusion, sometimes because of tradition, and sometimes just plain stubborn unwillingness to 'throw away good food’. Often, these Eastern Shore recipes include ingredients that seem at best unpalatable to our modern tastes, and at worst, simply repulsive. Why would you eat, say, something whose actual name reveals its humble origins (scrapple) when you could have a lovely choice cut of organic beef/chicken/pork that’s been tidily divorced from its host animal and prettily arranged with no trace of blood, skin, fur, or a face? The romantic answer would be to say the Eastern Shoreman (or woman) lives off the land, eschewing modern conveniences in favor of 'a simpler way’ of life. The more realistic answer might be that this is just the way it IS here. Why buy something when you can catch it yourself, and especially when what you’ve been raised to crave isn’t available in the grocery store anyway? Sure, you might enjoy the process, too, but when it comes down to it, when was the last time you saw muskrat on the menu at your local diner?

     

         Even Uncle Sam loves muskrat, too, especially served on porcelain and silver.

Muskrat is one of the quintessential staples of the Eastern Shore diet that has persisted as a local dish even while arguably 'better’ substitutes have become widely and inexpensively available. Muskrat, for those of you that don’t spend a lot of time out on the Chesapeake in a kayak, is a medium-sized, semi-aquatic rodent indigenous to North America. They have thick, soft fur, a scaly, slightly-flattened tail that propels them through the water, and bright orange front incisors. They live in marshes and shallow tribuatries, and build lodges of mud and reeds. Often, you can observe them as they swim through the water, pushing little rafts of cattails and reeds efficiently before them like slickly undulating tugboats.

    

For generations, Eastern Shore folk have been trapping muskrats for their oily, plush fur that has been demanded by sleek bipedal sophisticates since the 17th century. Fashioned into coats, hats, muffs, and mittens, muskrat fur was one of the first successful economic ventures in the new Chesapeake colony (eclipsing sassafras root, another early export which was peddled as a aromatic but ineffective 1600’s cure for venereal disease), and for the first hundred years, was primarily trapped by Indians. Colonists, in a rare moment of self-awareness, realized the Indians were far superior at locating and procuring the furry little rodents.  As the crown began to parcel and sell acreage in the best trapping areas in the 17th century for tobacco plantations, wealthy white investors involved in the fur trade purchased the properties solely so the Indians could continue to hunt without interference.

            

                             A muskrat muff for the discerning lady of fashion.

As it turned out, hundreds of muskrat pelts meant hundreds of pounds of muskrat meat. Traditionally, muskrat was part of the indigenous diet, and Chesapeake Indians continued to consume the greasy, pungent carcasses, generally in stewed form. As the Indian population was dispersed, assimilated, killed, or lost to disease by then 18th century, whites continued the practice of muskratting, though the boomtime of endless furs supplied to England were over, and the price for muskrat fur climbed or fell according to the follies of fashion. They also continued to eat the muskrats they trapped, once the valuable pelts were removed. But muskrat remained a very aquired, intensely regional taste, and never really caught on as a common dish outside of Chesapeake backwater towns.

This exerpt from American Fox and Fur Farmer Magazine from 1921 explains why: 

                                  

Muskrats, as you may have gleaned from the article, are strong-tasting. This is due to their high fat content, which makes for a greasy dinner, but also because of their musk glands, which if not removed correctly, can saturate the meat with an ungodly pungent reek. The article continues:

                                    

In short, there is more than one way to skin (and cook) a muskrat.

But surely this must be a dead, or dying, tradition, right? No one possibly eats rodent these days unless they have to.

Au contraire! Muskrat trapping, skinning, and cooking is alive and well on the Delmarva Peninsula (DELaware, MARyland, and VirginiA). In fact, an annual festival, the National Outdoor Show in Dorchester County, Maryland, celebrates the tradition, and a recent documentary, Muskrat Lovely, followed the festivities and challenges of the event:

Not only are contestants judged for rapidity and skill in trapping and skinning muskrat (which, if you remember, if done incorrectly will ruin the meat), but there are cookoffs and the highlight of the celebration, a beauty contest. Perhaps nothing underscores the continuing importance of the muskrat tradition then the development of a celebration that raises lady and rodent as simultaneously worthy of placement on dual pedestals.

              

Like the Etruscans and grapes, or the Indians and the sacred cow, the fatted muskrat holds a place of prominence in the traditional menu and culture of the Eastern Shore. And while it may never be mistaken for chicken, the 'marsh rabbit’ is just another reminder that in the towns and communities of the Chesapeake, roots in the waterways, the marshes, and yes, even the muskrat lodges, run deep.

      

For more information about the National Outdoor Show, check out their website here: http://bit.ly/e3LUx8

And for more details on Muskrat Lovely, click through here: http://to.pbs.org/z1Hclo

Byron of the Bay- part 1

      

“The moon and the tides were full; the summer southwest wind came up the river. It sighed through the pines and rustled in the green marshes. Red-winged blackbirds dipped the reeds. School of small fry, spawned that spring, rumpled the quiet cove, dodged the watchful kingfisher’s eye. The soft crab in his a mossy cell, waiting for the day when its shell would harden to match the water moccasin’s guile. Far out on the point, an old blue heron fished the shallows of the sand bar. Methodically, he plodded to and fro, pausing only when a slumbering minnow came within range of his marlinspike bill. Suddenly he stopped and turned his yellow eyes toward the south. In the distance, a huge white bird hovered close to the water. It was far larger than the great swans which passed his way each spring and fall, for it was a schooner, sailing up the river, wing and wing. The old heron had seen it many times and knew that the great white wings would not harm him. He resumed his fishing.”

                                                       Gilbert Byron, The Lord’s Oysters, 1947.

So opens the prologue from Gilbert Byron’s classic Chesapeake story, The Lord’s Oysters. Set in my hometown, Chestertown, and the surrounding rivers, marshes, and forests at the turn of the 19th century, it captures the innocence and the tiny tragedies of coming to age experienced by a young boy, Noah Marlin, and the Twainian cast of characters that surround him: his swaggering yet cowardly cousin Ric, his hard-drinking, hard-fishing waterman Daddy, his half-blind Grandpappy, living in a little ark on a quiet cove, and many others. Sensitively written and deeply connected to an environment that was still totally recognizable, The Lord’s Oysters captivated me as a kid, and I sought out landmarks that Noah described in his day-to-day life.

    

   The Great Marsh.

  

Lawyer’s Row, where Noah’s Daddy stayed out late gambling and carousing with the sheriff and men of the court.

   

The school where Noah got thrown out of class for “waggling his fingers” at his teacher.

But unlike a lot of my favorite books from my childhood, this one has aged rather well, in fact, as I’ve gotten older I’ve discovered so much more to love in Byron’s lyrical manner with prose, his understanding of the men who worked the water, and his uncanny ability to make dialogue sound like you just happen to be eavesdropping on real Chesapeake folk:

    “Hello, Mother,” the young waterman said, jumping ashore and kissing his wife and son.

“You’ve been drinking, George. I smell it on your breath.”

“I haven’t been drinking, Mother. I saw Captain Pete down the over and he gave me a couple of drinks, but that’s not really drinking.”

“What’s that in the bottom of the boat?”

“I got us a mess of oysters. I sure would like to have my fill of oyster fritters for supper.”

“You know you ain’t supposed to take oysters before September,” she said. “They’ll put the law on you.”

“They ain’t never put the law on a person for taking enough to eat,” he said. “Them’s the Lord’s Oysters, the good Lord put them in the river for folks like us ones.”

As a Chesapeake educator, I can also see so much rich historic documentation in The Lord’s Oysters, too. Before I cracked the spine of my dog-eared copy, I didn’t know that steamboats traversed the rivers of the Bay, and my river too, with great plumes of smoke billowing behind them, or that a man needed to tend the Chester River bridge to open it for masts of passing schooners. I had never heard of a showboat, complete with a full auditorium inside, twangy piano jangling and aging, painted ingenues at the wharf, ready to entertain the town. Chestertown, and the Chesapeake at large, while deceptively timeless in appearance, has nonetheless changed greatly, and none of these former cornerstones of Tidewater life remained in my childhood version of Noah’s stomping grounds. Through The Lord’s Oysters, though, they became familiar to me as history shadows, cast behind the landmarks of modern life to linger in the background, unnoticed unless you turned to look.

Just this week, we had the head of the Gilbert Byron Society speak at CBMM, and after his talk, we chatted a bit about our mutual love for Byron and The Lord’s Oysters. “It’s a shame you never knew Byron,” he commented (Byron died in 1991). “But I do know him,” I said. “I’ve met him in every book he wrote.”

And I do know Gilbert Byron, or at least the things he loved: playing hooky in the hot sun at the end of the school year, high jinks, adventure, his family, and above all, the silent character constantly in the room in every chapter, the wind-swept, green-smelling, thriving brackish habitat of the Chesapeake. While the James Adams showboat doesn’t dock at the wharf anymore, and the last of the big gun’s mighty report echoed in the marsh almost 75 years ago, that is one element where you can still touch a finger, like Alice through the looking glass, with Noah’s world.

      

Savin' Menhaden: The Most Important Fish You've Never Heard Of

When stocks of animals decline in the Chesapeake, alerts and articles go out, persuading residents throughout the watershed to take action, engage, write your congressman! Normally, these efforts drum up at least a modicum of support, especially if the animal is appealing. Appeal can be based on the animal’s beauty, like a tundra swan, or its deliciousness, like crabs. But some species are easier to sell as worthy of  protection than others, and one recent example taking up headline space in print and online is the imperiled, yet distinctly unmemorable menhaden. Getting the public to care about fish in general can be hard, unless they have that direct line to our stomach or hearts. And take away those two qualities to be left with a  fish that merely engages your intellect? Well, in that case, who cares?

Let me show you.

   

Clownfish! So cute! Just like Finding Nemo. Awwwww. (See that? Heartstrings. You’re ready to donate to the “Clownfish- Kittens of the Sea” foundation already.)

  

Mmmm. Rockfish. So delicious. Their numbers are down, you say? Well, we need to fix that! I love rockfish! (Connection to a fish species via a direct line to your gullet.)

But what about this little guy? Why care about him?

    

Ouch. Only a mother could love that face. And eat him? Well, since he’s a menhaden, he’s typically full of tiny, splintery bones, and his intensely oily flesh is also not particularly palatable for humans. Menhaden, in short, are a bit of a P.R. nightmare. To understand their importance, you have to go beyond their non-descript appearance and lackluster flavor to the role they play in the environment as a whole. They are, as it turns out, a ‘foundational species’.

     

When John Smith idly used a frying pan to fish from the exploratory shallop during his voyages throughout the Bay in 1608, he actually managed to catch something. So abundant were fin fish in Chesapeake waters that their sheer mass seemed innumerable, and certainly beyond the scale of human impact. One fish in that seething biomass was surely the menhaden. Silver scales gleaming like sheets of chain mail as they schooled throughout the Bay, the menhaden sought algae and other plankton, feeding other, larger fish even as they preyed with gaping mouths on microscopic plants and animals. Animals above the water sought menhaden, too, like osprey, eagle,  heron, and bittern. Menhaden formed the base of the food chain in a thriving Bay ecosystem that would feed and support the colonists and their progeny for generations.

While other species within this thriving biological soup, like shad, would be hauled out of the Bay by the millions to feed the population throughout the watershed and beyond from first settlement onwards, menhaden, too, became a vital resource for Chesapeake residents. But as I mentioned before, menhaden are distinctly distasteful. Their value was not in their journey to the plate but rather their journey to the field- menhaden were used as fertilizer. 

Today we use them in poultry feed and in fish oil supplements, in cosmetics and ground into chum for bait and aquaculture. A huge economy is based on the ready supply of this forgettable fish, especially in the Chesapeake and other estuarine bodies on the East Coast, and enormous numbers of menhaden are needed to satisfy the demand. Large-scale tactics are used to harvest menhaden, with schools identified from the air and rounded up by fleets of boats trailing purse seines.

       

As more and more industries rely on menhaden to create makeup, fish food, and fertilizer, the stakes are raised on this unassuming fish that, through filter feeding and its role in the food chain, is one of the things the Bay needs to stay balanced. This investigation by Washington, D.C.’s Channel 5 News sums up the environmental and economic impacts of an uncertain menhaden fishery stating, “Menhaden are the most important fish you’ve never heard of.” It turns out that if you want to make an animal appeal for advocacy, perhaps the most persuasive approach of all is to pull on their purse strings.

"Save the Bay- Keep Pullution Away"

Starting in January, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is going to be hosting entries from an art contest focusing on the Chesapeake Bay. Organized by the author of a children’s book series about the Bay, Donna McCartney, and sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Trust, the contest has been wide reaching and, given some of the artwork, very inspiring. The kids who drew pictures for the contest come from all over the Chesapeake Bay watershed- Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, even West Virginia. They may have never actually seen the Bay in person. So, the concepts conveyed in their work are incredibly varied. For some, you can see a personal connection. Others know the Bay from driving over it. Even more are familiar with the Chesapeake through a classroom curriculum, but probably think of the Chesapeake as an extension of the ocean.

The one thing all of the work has in common is how beautiful, how thoughtful, and often, how funny or quirky it is.

    

A Matisse-style crab against a gorgeously murky background pleads for a cleaner environment.

   

A classic summer scene- an osprey; clutching a dead fish (we know it’s dead because of the crossed-out eyes), flies towards it’s channel marker home over a Bay full of animal life.

  

I call this one “Still Life with Snakehead.” Perhaps meant to evoke the flotsam carried on the top of the water by the current, the empty bottle and dead fish tell us this is not a thriving estuary. A cautionary tale.

   

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge full of summer traffic, surrounded by sail boats and fishing vessels. No caption needed- this is the Bay we get to enjoy if we take care of it.

    

Many students have a concept of pollution as a thing that they can see- and trash is the most common way that kids can convey a source of contamination that comes from human use (or misuse). In this picture, trash is literally choking the animal life in the Chesapeake, represented by a gull with a plastic six-pack ring around its neck, and empty bags and discarded soda cans on the beach.

But some kids understand a bit more about the nuances of Bay pollution, or in this case, “pullution”:

   

Nutrient pollution from chicken farms, stormwater runoff, and an incredibly detailed toilet. I don’t know about you, gentle readers, but my 4th grade drawing skills had nothing on the very talented 4th grade young lady that created this trifecta of sludge.

You can’t help but marvel at the artistic imagination, the technique, and the advanced concepts addressed by these entries. If it’s the next generation of Chesapeake stewards we’re educating, it looks like the Bay and its tributaries is in very good hands, indeed.

To learn more about the contest and Donna McCartney’s work, click here:www.nauticalmilebooks.com

And for the next 3 months, these works and more will be on display for the public to enjoy at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. So come down and see what the Chesapeake has inspired!

One more bald cypress bites the dust

      

Remember that post about Chesapeake bald cypresses? Well, some of the largest still in existence are down in Florida’s swampland. Or, at least, they were until an electrical storm felled the mightiest, known as “the Senator,” earlier this week. While enormous trees like “the Senator” used to be unexceptional in America’s vast stands of wilderness, as modernity and its gluttony for space encroaches ever further out, the loss of even one such tree is nothing short of irreplaceable.

Read an article about the Senator’s demise here: http://bit.ly/xomZvO

You can read that original post on bald cypresses here: http://bit.ly/u0gmc7

Farming vs. fishing

     

We’re in an “R” month, and that means oysters. Chesapeake oysters, to be precise. But as many of you know, the populations of Bay oysters are at record lows, which puts watermen and oyster consumers on new, unsteady ground. Do we continue our wild oyster harvest, as one of the last places in the world to do so? Or do we embrace oyster aquaculture and grow the oysters mollusk aficionados demand?

Celebrated Chesapeake author Tom Horton discusses the future of Chesapeake oysters in an article in Southern Maryland Online today, and sums up nicely the fishing/farming quandary facing the industry. “Must the rise of farming mean goodbye to the wild? And is it on balance a bad thing or just a new thing?”

Click through to read the article here: http://bit.ly/yCEt0f

Brilliantly Colored Carpets

When introducing new visitors to the museum, I find it helpful to put the Chesapeake in its environmental history context; to understand what the Bay is like now, it’s essential to understand what it was like before- 50, 100, or even 400 years ago. Some of the oldest accounts I share of the ‘primordial’ Chesapeake as the first colonists encountered it are so radically different from our modern Bay as to seem outlandish hyperbole at best and downright lies at worst. Giant oysters as long as your forearm? Dinosaur fish, twelve feet long, patrolling the rivers with armored plates? Flocks of brightly colored parrots blanketing cypress swamps in gaudy, twittering color? Impossible! Totally absurd!

But these descriptions can be substantiated with artifacts and fossil evidence- a bony plate from an enormous sturgeon found in an uncovered Jamestown trash midden, for example, or oysters the size of a tall man’s shoe, dredged from a channel bottom. And the one about the parrots? Well, up until about 100 years ago, you could have confirmed that legend with your own two eyes. Carolina Parakeets were the only parrot species native to North America, and for 300 years after settlement, they painted the skies with their gold, green and red plumage in flocks numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

    

As depicted in this image by John James Audubon, the Carolina Parakeet was a foraging bird, known for dusting cockleburrs, cypress groves, and later, (foreshadowingly) fruit orchards with whirring, gaudy companies numbering in the hundreds. Carolina Parakeets were also highly social, mating for life, roosting together at night, and prodigiously reproducing. Those social instincts compelled them to defend other threatened or injured parakeets from predators, and when alerted to a bird in danger, the rest of the flock would swarm to its rescue, a tendency that became highly problematic for their population once hunting humans entered the picture.

      

Initially, the parakeets were a pretty decoration to the backdrop of endless forests blanketing the eastern coast of North America. But as those forests were felled to clear the land for farming, the voracious appetites and sheer number of the Carolina Parakeet soured their appeal to farmers who watched the birds descend on their apple trees and wheat sheaves like a plague of locusts. According to Audubon, who witnessed the birds devour a grain crop, the flocks so densely covered the field it appeared as if “brilliantly colored carpets had been thrown on them.”

The retaliation was instantaneous and severe. As the parakeets never learned to fear humans, it was also rather easy, and was made easier by their habit of defending the fallen. Audubon described these massacres:  “The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more on ammunition.”

Naturalists also observed this curious tendency, as described by Alexander Wilson in 1808:

“ When they alighted on the ground it appeared at a distance as if covered by a
carpet of richest green, orange, and yellow: they afterwards settled, in one body,
on a neighboring tree … covering almost every twig of it … Having shot down a
number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly
around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty
yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, although showers ofthem fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase….”

(Apparently being a naturalist in those days didn’t preclude you from killing as many as you wanted in the name of curious science.)

As the dazzling flocks of parakeets were being exterminated by farmers as pests and naturalists as accident-prone anomalies, they were additionally threatened by that glutton of natural beauty, fashion. Trends in the late 19th century dictated that flat, wide-brimmed hats, decorated with every manner of trim, frippery and feather were a la mode, and there was a always a great hunger for unique, picturesque materials. The Carolina Parakeet’s intensely saturated red, yellow and green plumage made it an ideal candidate for spicing up one’s dated chapeau with a decoration that was charmingly American. So enamored were the hat makers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York with the stiff little beauties that they even worked in the entire bird into their creations.

                       

                     Look at that expression. She knows what she did.

By the turn of the 19th century, the last remaining flocks of Carolina Parakeets were struggling along in Florida swamps, where their scarcity damned them to be constantly pursued by ardent collectors and trappers. Even the trees they roosted in stung them, as the European honeybee proliferated in North America and took up residence in the hollow trees the parakeets clustered in at night. The last wild birds were seen in Okeechobee, Florida in 1920.

There were a few captives, however, in zoos throughout the world, but those, too, were struggling. The last surviving pair in the United States were ironically housed in the same cursed cage in the Cincinatti Zoological Gardens as the last passenger pigeon, which had died two years before. The birds had been mated for an incredible 32 years. In the late summer of 1917, the female, Lady Jane, died.  Incas, the male, became listless after her death, and in February 1918, followed his mate for life to that big cypress in the sky.

    

Points

An arrowhead, aimed at a wild turkey, takes a rogue dive into the underbrush. Over the years, ferns uncurl and wave above it, only to return back to the loam. Tree roots embrace it. A storm fells the tree, and seasons of rainwater disgorge the arrowhead, washing it into a gulley, a stream, a river, where it bumps along the bottom, carried by the current. Waves wash it closer to shore along with other gravelly bits. Finally, it emerges again, just another pebble. Waiting to be found by a girl with a keen eye and the patience to search each bit of beach until she discovers her prize.

     

It’s a familiar story to legions of kids who have grown up along the Chesapeake- the constant seeking and the desperately, thrillingly rare finding of arrowheads. The prolonged and intense presence of Indians throughout the Chesapeake for thousands of years has peppered them in layers of soil, and they’re discovered on islands, falling out of sandy cliffs, washed up along marshes, and clinging to spring mud in farm fields.  But the discovery of arrowheads can lead to so much more- an understanding of how Indians, over centuries, developed and honed their hunting techniques, and how they related to the verdant world around them.

In the new Bay Journal issue, Kent Mountford explores the history and culture behind arrowheads and what they mean about the people who made them and the Chesapeake they knew in this month’s “Past is Prologue” installment, which you can check out here: http://bit.ly/zUuyHc

Happy hunting!

     

Negative forty below

It’s been cold the last few nights for those of us who live on and around the Bay. The thermometer in my living room registered a toasty 50 degrees Fahrenheit at 8 pm yesterday evening, but that was far preferable to the glacial 22 degrees being suffered by the loudly complaining geese on the creek outside. But as any old-timer will tell you, this is hardly “cold”. My grandfather Hartley Bayne, a weathered Eastern Shoreman if there ever was one,  recalls a winter in the 1940’s when he and some friends drove an old Packard from Chestertown, 20 miles up the Chester River, downstream and around the Bay side to Rock Hall. Their ‘road’ was made of river ice, two feet thick. Even that seems balmy compared to the coldest winter on record in Maryland in 1912, when temperatures were observed to have dropped to an immobilizing -40 degrees below zero.

Few people would venture out in such conditions, the exception generally being the foolhardy (for example, teenagers, like my grandfather was at the time of his Packard joy ride) or those on vessels that braved the conditions professionally, like tugboats and skipjacks. But for some, venturing out wasn’t the issue; you were already trapped in a Chesapeake that had transformed from gigantic moat to icy tundra. You were a Bay lighthouse keeper.

     

One of the distinctive features of Chesapeake lighthouses, the screw-pile legs, also proved to be one of their most dangerous. Screw-pile legs offered numerous advantages over tower-style lighthouses (the usual kind you imagine when you think 'lighthouse’): they provided stability on the Bay’s soft, sandy bottom, they allowed the lighthouse to be positioned so as to warn watercraft away from shoals or sandbars that were often miles out in the water, plus they were cheap and quick to build. Screw-pile lighthouses proliferated in the Chesapeake after the Civil War, replacing lightships (boats with warning lights and bells onboard) with these permanent structures. Soon their spindly legs and hexagonal or octagonal shapes could be seen on rivers and creeks throughout the Chesapeake, perched over the water like so many exposed honeycombs.

Those spidery little supports were also the fatal flaw of the screw-pile design. They worked beautifully in the summer, spring, and fall, providing consistent guidance to vessels on the Bay and offering space inside generous enough to house two keepers who kept the lamps lit and the fog bells ringing. But in deep winter, when ice locked the Bay into frozen, hushed stasis, the delicate iron pilings were nothing but brittle twigs in the face of the ice floes that moved towards the ocean during the inevitable thaw. Silent monoliths while in motion, the enormous shards of ice screamed with collision as they pounded the lighthouses, creating a din like a million Colt revolvers firing. When the supports buckled, some of the lighthouses simply toppled over, their lights extinguished by the water and keepers scrambling for shore. In the case of the Hooper Strait Lighthouse in 1877, there was another terrifying option: the lighthouse started to move.

The support sheared off at the base, the Hooper Strait lighthouse had nothing to tether it, and it began to float down the Chesapeake like an enormous decoy floe. The keepers had no recourse but to lower their lifeboat and struggle over the chunks of jagged unstable ice towards the almost invisible shoreline that lay several miles away.  From the account written by Keeper John S. Cornwell on January 8th 1877, “We escaped from our perilous condition by the aid of one of the boats belonging to the house which we pulled on the ice. We remained on the ice for twenty four hours without anything to shelter us, in consequence of which both of us became frost bitten the effects of which we are now suffering…”

The Keeper Cornwell and his assistant, Alexander S. Conway, we rescued the next morning after a bitterly cold night on the ice, and taken to a nearby island where, weakened by harrowing escape and without means of communication, they had no way of letting the authorities or their families know they had survived the disaster. It would be two weeks before they were able to notify anyone.

Other accounts of similar experiences abound in logbooks of Chesapeake keepers. Within the Museum’s photography collection, there’s an image of a rescue party recovering two keepers from a later-style caisson lighthouse at Craighill Channel in the winter of 1936. Standing on the hard-packed ice, the rescued men wearily smoke cigarettes, celebrating their slippery escape, while the lifeboat hangs uselessly off the lighthouse behind them. 

        

The life-threatening winters were  not only the serious downside of lighthouse keeping, which provided steady pay, housing, and a pension and was therefore a rather sought-after post. Those harrowing Januaries when sharp-edged bergs roughed the horizon line were also a reason women were not permitted to tend lighthouses- it was considered out-of-the-question for delicate females to perform such a dangerous occupation.

So what happened to the two-frost bitten keepers, stranded in the middle of an ice-encrusted Bay? Well, when the Hooper Strait lighthouse was rebuilt in 1879, John S. Cornwell signed on again, returning to his (we assume) now-stabilized post, several miles out in the Chesapeake. Alexander S. Conway, however, took his remaining fingers and toes elsewhere and is lost to our records. He had learned the hard way the steep price you can pay when you challenge the Chesapeake in winter and lose.

A little Christmas history gift, courtesy of a 1960’s National Bohemian Beer campaign. National Bohemian beer, for all of you who are not natives of the Chesapeake, is the ‘traditional’ brew of Baltimore, produced in the city since 1885 by the National Brewing Company. Their trademark mascot, the beloved one-eyed mustachioed “Mr. Boh,” was introduced in 1936 and has since been embraced by Baltimoreans as an unofficial city symbol, and their 1950’s slogan “From the Land of Pleasant Living” has come to represent the attitude and approach of the Chesapeake lifestyle, then and now. The National Brewing Company changed hands several times, and before it was purchased by the Carling Company in 1973, it had the distinction of being the only operating brewery left in Baltimore. Today, it is still brewed by 'foreigners’ (a.k.a non-Marylanders) out-of-state, but Chesapeake folk still embrace the light beer as their own. Rare is the newspaper-covered picnic table, mounded with Old-Bay dusted steamed crabs, that isn’t garnished with icy bottles of Maryland’s traditional suds, 'Natty Boh’.

Wood Eternal

      

Did you know there are redwoods growing in the Chesapeake? Well, a member of the redwood family, anyway: the bald cypress, Taxodium distichum. Today, we’re at the very northern tip of its range, which extends south into Florida and west into Texas. But in the prehistoric past, the great swamps extended their lush hummocks and tannin-rich water all the way to modern New England. Sometimes the fossilized rounds of these massive primordial stands are uncovered, and the cypress, now stone, is exposed to a sky where the only pterodactyls are made of metal and steel. 

Still, there are places throughout the Chesapeake watershed where groves of these ancient plants still thrive, their stabilizing knobby knees protruding from the sepia swamp water. Their frond-like leaves are deciduous, and in the fall, you can identify a bald cypress by its rusty color as the leaves change and its subsequent nakedness as they drop- which is how the bald cypress got its common name.

      

Bald cypress groves have produced some of the oldest trees existing in North America. Dendrologists dated core samples from a cypress along North Carolina’s Black River back to 364 A.D. With a life span that monumental, these trees take their time growing and reproducing- most specimens don’t produce seeds until they are 30 years old. Once they germinate, bald cypresses rely on the water lapping at their knees to float their seeds to raised marsh hummocks where they pickily refuse to thrive unless there is constant moisture. Born out of water, and thriving on water, bald cypress is famously water and rot resistant, and is referred to in the lumber trade as ‘wood eternal’. These admirable characteristics have made it highly desirable  for human use- first by the Chesapeake Indians, who used it to construct their enormous dugout canoes, and later by colonists who fashioned it into ships, shingles, clapboard, water tanks, and coffins. Even the swamps themselves were useful, providing cover for all manner of bootleggers, smugglers, escaped convicts, runaway slaves and other sundry fugitives.

   

    Bald cypresses show a lot of knee. The Victorians would be scandalized!

Today, many ancient cypress swamps have been denuded by lumber mills. However, there are still plenty of places to enjoy a quietly magical paddle around an old cypress grove. The Pocomoke River, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is one of them, but only by the blessing of conservation. By the 1930’s, the cypress swamp was totally deforested and abandoned, cursed by its own utility. At that point, the federal government began purchasing tracts of discarded property in the watershed, and when the state assumed ownership in the 1950’s, the cypresses were just old enough to reproduce. When you see the restored swamp now, the 100-year-old cypresses tower overhead, and below, the water is rich with tannins. On every surface that might contain a thin scrum of nutrients, leafy things emerge.

       

Bald cypress swamps are cradles for all sorts of life- otters, muskrats, salamander, owls, floating and submerged plants cling to the cypress knees.Their bark bristles with lichen, and spanish moss drifts from the canopy. Entering these watery forests, you feel like you’re rejoining the food chain- and not necessarily as the one at the top.

A town that isn't a town

     

Yesterday was the first volunteer field trip, well, not EVER but definitely ever since I started working at the Museum, which is almost 4 years now. We visited Londontown, an historic site in Edgewater, Maryland, that was once a town established to service (and later abandoned by) the tobacco trade in the 17th century. It’s an interesting hodge-podge of new, old, reconstructed and restored buildings, all on a little spot overlooking the South River that now is crowded with (mc)mansions, but once bristled with the masts of vessels from transatlantic ports.

     

 Our inimitable guide, Rod Cofield, talking about Londontown’s kitchen gardens.

Our day was guided by Londontown’s director of interpretation, Rod Cofield, who explored the site with us and helped raise the ghosts of Londontown’s past through fascinating stories pulled right out of primary documents and first person-accounts of life in the community. Some of the history was sad, like the 18th century obituary of a baby that had been scalded to death by a boiling kettle as it was sleeping next to a hearth. Others were intriguing and mysterious, like the gravesite that was discovered by archaeologists while digging around the foundations of an 18th century workshop. Hidden beneath what was then the floorboards (but now is a square of earth under the reconstructed building above) was the grave of a small child, intentionally interred so, Cofield believes, as to be close to its living relatives- an African tradition perhaps honored in this new colony by a slave. All of Rod’s accounts were engrossing, and really made the site’s history seem viscerally alive.

       

        

There were little details everywhere, like these kitchen sauces and spices and cooking implements, that Londontown uses in their living history programs. The fact that many of their exhibits are in day-to-day use, especially during the school tour season, made some of the spaces feel like the original inhabitants had just stepped outside for a breath of sorta-fresh air. Not too fresh, since household trash and night soil piles, according to Rod, were generally collected under the windows and next to the doors. Many of their buildings are reproductions, and were constructed with the intent to have them be working examples of the past, but their attention to authenticity was rigorous- right down to the chamber pots, which were based on actual examples exhumed by archaeologists on the Londontown property (Rod said: “They’ve never been used, I swear!”). You could ask questions and learn a little something about every object in each room- even the most mundane pieces, like the chamberpots, had a story and research to back it up.

   

     Rod discussing the reconstructed workshop. There be a baby grave inside.

It was a beyond-cool experience, and the volunteers and I found ourselves lingering after it was obvious from rumblings in the general midsections of the group that we’d gone way past our lunchtime. We all left with promises to come back, maybe by water, maybe with friends, to check out more of the buildings or to explore the rest of the gorgeously-gardened property. Interested in visiting yourself after reading that glowing review? You can check out their website and plan an excursion: http://bit.ly/pb4xK

Also, a neat opportunity is coming up to hear Rod speak here, at CBMM, as part of our winter lecture series! He’s giving a talk on 18th century tavern culture in the Chesapeake tidewater, and not to spoil it, but one of his stories includes the following gem: “On February 18, 1697, in Virginia’s Elizabeth City County Court, Ann Combs complained to the justices that Jacob Walker and his wife Rebeccah gave her a drink of ‘wine and piss mixed together.’”

Come on- how can you miss it now? Plus, there will be tasting of rum shrub, an 18th century mixed drink WITH THE RUM IN IT.

Here’s the skinny on Rod’s talk:   

If the text is too tiny, you can also see more about the talk and how to register on our website, here: http://www.cbmm.org/index.htm

It was one of those days where your brain is a hive of new information, and you can’t stop looking at your volunteers and saying, “Isn’t this fun? This is so GREAT.” Or, at least, I couldn’t. Many thanks to Rod and Londontown for providing us with such a fantastic experience. I’m looking forward to hearing more of Rod’s historical anecdotes going forward, and learning, through Londontown and even more sites as we venture out on these volunteer trips, to appreciate this great old Bay I get to call my home AND my profession.

Seasoning (not the Old Bay kind)

For most people these days,  if you spend any time on the Bay, it’s usually to relax. Kayaking, sailing, taking the kids out for a day on Conquest Beach in your motorboat with a cooler of drinks and sandwiches, fishing off the town dock. Watch the sun set, enjoy the view, that sort of thing. Serene, fun.

This is a purely modern approach towards our watershed, though, when you compare the present to the Bay’s tumultuous past. It’s hard to conceive of the Chesapeake being a place where you literally risked your hide for access to its resources or land. But from plenty of historical accounts, we can see that it was anything but serene.

A perfect example of the life-or-death history of the Chesapeake is the ‘seasoning’ time of the 17th century, where you either survived virulent bouts of malaria and were considered 'seasoned’, or you summarily kicked the bucket, and were therefore 'unseasoned’. Seasoning was a risky prospect, but as with many of the foolhardy, ignorant, or rash decisions made by many colonists bound for different parts of the New World in the 17th century, it was considered to be the price of admission for a part of the land rush in the New World. The Chesapeake’s price, though, turned out to be mighty steep.

                    

This skeleton, courtesy of Smithsonian’s 'Spelled in Bones’ exhibit, clearly 'unseasoned’.

Immigrants from England expected the seasoning process, and letters from new colonists reflect commonplace nature of the illness. William Fitzhugh wrote in 1687 that his sister, a new Virginia resident, had experienced, “two or three small fits of fever and ague, which has now left her, and so consequently her seasoning [is] over.”

Although bouts of 'seasoning’ were commonplace and frequently fatal, very little was known about it at the time. Mostly differentiated from other ailments by a very high body termperature, malaria in those days was commonly referred to as “ague” (pronounced  'egg yoo’), a general term for fever. The cause was attributed to bad air (in Italian, literally mal aria), and Chesapeake residents were especially wary of exposure to the torpid humidity of the Bay’s marshes and swamps in September and October, when cases of ague peaked. 

Now we know that seasonality reflects the life and breeding cycle of the malarial carriers, mosquitoes. But then, colonists feared the very indian summer air they breathed, terrified of a death like Landon Carter’s daughter Sukey suffered in 1758: “-her face, feet and hands are all cold and her pulse quite gone and reduced to the bones and skin that can cover them and dying very hard- severe stroke indeed to A Man bereft of a Wife and in the decline of life.” Sukey was only 7.

For 35 to 40 percent of Chesapeake population to come down with malaria, this was the consequence of the 'seasoning period’: agonizing death over several days, prefaced by intensifying cycles of raging fever, drenching sweats, and violent chills. For those who survived seasoning, relapses were common, in addition to a weakened immune system that was susceptible to a host of other horrible-sounding ailments: the “bloody flux”, “bilious fever” and the disturbingly vague “swellings”.

Attempts at treatment sound similarly awful. In this 18th century document titled, “Ye Fever, an Ague, ye Cure,” fasting, emetics, and vomiting are prescribed for the ailing patient (read full transcription here: http://bit.ly/vcqGG7). All this, if you survived, for a life of expectancy of about 45 years for a man, and 4 to 8 years less for a woman.

So the next time you watch the sunset over the Chesapeake, ice tinkling in your glass, ask yourself: would you risk it? Risk fever and chills, 'swellings’ and agony, for a chance to make a new start? And then take another sip of your gin and tonic and enjoy the fact that you don’t have to.

* I relied on a few great resources for this piece that I’d like to acknowledge: “Ague and Seasoning” by Robert T. Whitlock, M.D., from CBMM’s periodical, The Weather Gauge, and “Living and Dying on the 17th Century Patuxent Frontier” by Julia A. King and Douglas H. Ulbelaker, available to read online at the Jefferson Patterson Park website here: http://bit.ly/s5TJx9

History-threaded needle in a virtual haystack

    

           1896 birds-eye view of Annapolis towards the harbor, courtesy of LOC.

                    (higher resolution image here: http://1.usa.gov/rwqym7 )

Often, research is like a series of miner’s tunnels: you start spelunking down one direction, and the next thing you know, you’re following sparkly little history diamonds away from your marked path, into unknown but possibly enriching lodes of cool information. I started off this morning looking for scanned images of Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper. I found a few, and one really great copy lead me to the Library of Congress, where more links lead me to 19th century Chesapeake stuff, and then to this: http://1.usa.gov/rN7OlM, an online exhibit called “the Capital and the Bay”. A few more clicks, and I was looking at this wonderfully rich picture of Annapolis in the very last years of the 19th century.

What an amazing resource! What a great little wormhole to fall into! The dirt roads, the schooners in the harbor, the houses all slanty and bunnyhopping over each other, the painted advertisements on the sides of the shops (“BLOCH BROS Mail Pouch Tobacco” advertised twice!), the little Eastport cottages overlooking a marsh in the distance. It’s winter, and the leaves are off the trees. The harbor is bustling, nothing like the ‘ego alley’ we think of today- gone are the slick yachts and ostentatious speed boats that crowd the docks, jockeying for attention. Instead we’ve got smaller, wooden sail craft like the traditional Chesapeake log canoe stacked in rows of threes and four deep to the wharf. This is a working waterfront, crowded with oyster packing houses, muddy and rutted from the wheel tracks of the traditional horsecarts and a few of the new motorized carriages. This is the heart of Annapolis, where the Bay’s winter harvest along with goods and serviced arrived by water as they had for almost 200 years.

And what was I researching again?

You see how this happens, but what a happy problem. Enjoy the image as well as this thought- history is just pulsing just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. The next time you’re on West Street, headed down towards the water, consider those dirt roads, the squashy houses, and that cold, air heavy with the rich smell of Chesapeake marsh and oysters. Nothing and everything has changed.

Book club, on the half shell

      

December is a time for holiday gatherings- carols, turkey, the inevitable ‘white elephant’ gift you’ll be stuck with all year, reconnecting family and friends, and here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, it’s an 'R’ month, which means it’s also time for oysters. This seasonal hankering for a mouthful, tasting, as de Maupassant wrote, “small and rich, looking like little ears enfolded in shells, melting between the palate and the tongue like salted sweets,” is a very old tradition, indeed. It stretches back before colonization to the time of the American Indian, where generations of East Coast oyster eaters left layers of their empty shells in immense, drifting piles, called middens.

It can be easy, here at the Museum, to become focused on Bay-related history to the exclusion of everything else. But in doing so, we miss the big picture. Enter this month’s book club pick, Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster, which uses the humble mollusk as a guide through New York City’s 400 year history . Like the Chesapeake, New York’s oyster beds were incredibly prolific and expansive. The oysters within them, often 8-10 inches in size, brought the harbor’s briny bouquet to savoring mouths from the Lenape of the 1400’s to the rough and tumble oyster saloons of the 19th century. Again, sound familiar? But the narrative of the story stops short of the one we share at CBMM- by 1927, the New York oyster bars were closed. Today, it remains an estuary too polluted by poisoning chemicals for human consumption of its shellfish, and its oyster industry is only one of import.

Of course, I’m skipping over all of the really good parts, but if you’re intrigued, please read along with us in December. We’ll have a book club discussion in early January, with a blog post here to accompany the conversation. So grab a copy of The Big Oyster and slip away from the holiday hustle to the back corner of a 1840’s oyster house, where the platters of oysters shining from within their salty baths will keep coming, as fast as you can tilt the shell and slip them down your throat.

             

amazon.com link here: http://amzn.to/uOnuBq   

NYT book review here: http://nyti.ms/d3yPkD 

You can also read the first chapter free here: http://nyti.ms/tLALfG

Moving forward, our monthly book club picks will be available in our CBMM Museum Store, here in St. Michaels, Maryland.

Hand tonging for oysters is a signature sight of the Chesapeake winter, as has been for over 250 years. Tonging is the oldest way to gather oysters after the far more ancient technique of wading in and working free the most appealingly large shells from their encrusted habitats. Once oystermen, working in ones and twos, would have worked off of sail craft, like the iconic log canoe. Their tongs grew ever longer as the oyster beds diminished from years of harvest; once breaking the surface, by the 19th century they were pulled up from a depth of 20 feet or more.  Real muscle is needed to maneuver and lift these tongs, which catch and lift oysters, cultch and all the little organisms of the oyster bar to the water’s surface. Tonging watermen face slow, backbreaking work. But as this video attests, they also see the most dazzling mornings water, sunlight, and fog can create.

Bay Science 101

    

           A CBMM audience “diving into” Chesapeake biology. Pun intended.

Last week, before the Thanksgiving holiday, about 35 interested people from the Chesapeake Bay watershed (some from as far away as Cecil County or Pennsylvania!) gathered in the Bay History building here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum to learn about Chesapeake aquatic life of both the swimming and photosynthesizing sort. Offered through a partnership between the Museum and Horn Point Labs in Cambridge, the two presentations, offered by Horn Point professionals, were the final sessions in a two-part series called “Chesapeake Science for Non-Scientists.” It was a great program; engaging, informative, and easily applicable to your neck of the Chesapeake, no matter how far North or South. Afterwards, the two presenters, Cassie Gurbisz and Angie Hengst, sent along their powerpoint presentations as PDFs so I could share them with any interested public (is that you? If so, send me an e-mail at klivie@cbmm.org and I’ll make sure you get a copy).

Looking forward, I hope to have different presenters begin to visit us from Horn Point regularly, so if you missed this program and want to bone up on Bay quality and critters, keep checking our website at www.cbmm.org for new offerings.

Lecture photo courtesy of Kathy Bosin.

Birds of a Feather

    

                                             A mute swan and cygnet.

Wedges of migratory birds, drifting overhead, is one of the most familiar winter sights in the Chesapeake. Ducks, geese, and swans seek refuge in the Bay’s many coves, creeks, and fields, populating icy shallows with their bright plumage and distinctive woodwind calls while feeding on the Bay’s vast underwater meadows. Traditionally, swans were smaller in number than the other waterfowl, and their ivory feathers and huge wingspan stood out distinctively from the rest of the flock. You could expect to see mostly Tundra or Trumpeter swans, both indigenous to North America, whose fluting or hornlike calls respectively made them just as identifiable by sound alone.

But since the 1950’s, there’s been a beautiful impostor infiltrating the Chesapeake- the mute swan. As year-round residents, these European swans devour the already-imperiled underwater grasses of the Bay, and addressing the problem of their population boom and its impact has created controversy among Chesapeake residents and landowners, bird lovers, and the Department of Natural Resources.

Kent Mountford, writer for the Chesapeake Bay Journal, discusses the history of the Chesapeake’s swan conundrum here: http://bit.ly/gIW68

But how to tell these swans apart? The Washington Post has a great, short article on swan identification and a snippet about the controversy brewing over mute swans: http://wapo.st/t2JRXr

    

                         What’s your opinion on the Bay’s swan problem?

For all the Washington, DC, readers out there- a photo from 12th St NW, circa 1922. Here at the Museum we tell the story of oysters and oystering, from the life cycle of our favorite mollusk to its demise on the shucking table. This photo goes one step further, and shows how the Chesapeake’s erstwhile inhabitants, once they left the buyboats and packing houses, were sold to an urban market- with quite popular and prolific results, it seems. Oyster houses, a staple of East Coast city life since the 18th century, were frequented by all manner of classes and races, drawn by the cheap cost and delicate brine of the Chesapeake oyster, and could be found in almost every neighborhood.

To look more closely, click on the photo above, which is featured on a website, Shorpy (http://www.shorpy.com),  which shares incredible vintage photography.  You can see a detailed version of the photo here: http://bit.ly/vn9Ydc.  Make sure to read the comments, too- pretty interesting insights!

Two Chesapeake history websites to get lost in

I can remember, as a graduate student, how we were warned away from using the internet as a research tool. “It’s a fad!” my professors said. “The sources are questionable, take everything you see with a grain of salt.” While bad at predicting the future, they were certainly right about the latter point: while there’s plenty of information online, how do you know where to go for reputable, reliable content? Often, it’s just a matter of combing through different sites until you hit on those that are winners.

This is where I come in. Consider the loss of hours of my time combing through the farthest, most cobwebby edges of the internet in the search for reputable resources your gain! I have a few that I consistently recommend through my educational work at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and come back to use over and over again. The two I’ll share today are especially good at explaining a pretty broad overview of Bay history without it being too dry, too dense, or just plain boring, while still offering well-researched historical facts and stories.

One is the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia, who has an online exhibit, “The Chesapeake Bay, Our History and Our Future” that you can visit here: http://bit.ly/rOGjZv

It gives a wonderful, broad-strokes view of what happened in the Bay, from the time period of the Indians onward. I’ve used it many times myself and consider it to be one of my favorite tried-and-true sites. The historical narrative jumps around a bit, and mostly hits the big-picture Chesapeake stories (for example, it makes a huge leap from “colonial era” to “Oyster Wars”), but for the themes it explores, it’s a wonderful place to start learning.

The second is a site I’ve used for six years now (an absolute eternity for internet content!), since my days as an outreach educator at Sultana Projects. Part of the Jamestown 400th anniversary celebration, this is an exhaustively researched and innovatively compiled Pandora’s box of content relating to the early days of Chesapeake colonization called “The Chesapeake- Then and Now”.  Contrasting the accounts of John Smith, Christopher Newport, and Gabriel Archer with snippets from today’s Chesapeake residents, this site paints a picture of an unspoiled, tumultuous Bay while contrasting it with the troubled, still controversial one we know today. Be warned- you can easily lose a few hours of your life while falling down this Chesapeake history rabbit hole: http://on.natgeo.com/cLkd0R

Enjoy dipping into these great websites, and definitely consider ‘bookmarking’ them for quick reference!