_{Image by author.}

It’s a cold, windy morning, well before sunrise at Turner’s Creek Landing in Kent County, Maryland, but Capt. Owen Clark’s workboat Aluminator is already idling at the dock. He’s got a full day ahead of him and is ready to head out to check his pots, November bluster or not. Clark works one of the Chesapeake most ancient, obscure fisheries—Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Once an essential element of every working waterman’s repertoire, eeling has fallen off to just a few watermen in recent decades—a far cry from an era when chunks of salted eel baited every crabber’s trotline from Turkey Point to Cape Henry.

Eel have been a seasonal harvest for millennia. Across the centuries, indigenous people created v-shaped weirs in tributaries throughout the Bay. As eels moved downstream, they were funneled by the weirs into a small point where they were trapped or speared. Smoked or dried, the eel harvest fed communities of Native Americans throughout the winter months. Even today, ghostly remnants of our eeling past persist. Submerged weirs have been found throughout the Susquehanna, and indigenous place names like Swarata (“where we feed on eel”) and Shamokin (“Eel Creek”) linger in our contemporary landscape if not our memory.

The first colonists, always seeking familiar foods, were delighted to discover one of their favorite fish thriving in their new Chesapeake homeland. England in particular had a rich eel foodways culture, and freshly-caught Thames eel featured prominently in all sorts of dishes. Jellied, stewed and roasted eel, and the ever-present eel pie were all popular 17th century dishes among the working classes. In the colonies, American eel continued to be a favored dish. One of the earliest cookbooks to circulate in the colonies, Hannah Glasse’s 1747 The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, contains no less than three eel recipes, while Amelia Simmons’ 1796 American Cookery—the first cookbook published in America—provided housewives with helpful tips for selecting the freshest and tastiest eels when shopping at a fishmonger’s stall. Mary Randolph’s 1825 The Virginia Housewife shows the enduring popularity of eel well into the 19th century, with recipes for boiled and pitchcocked eel.

The culinary endurance of the American Eel is matched by the physical endurance of eels themselves. A catadromous species, they spend the majority of their lives in the upper tributaries of North America’s East Coast. But at sexual maturity in a mysterious process, they embark on an epic one-way journey to the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea, traveling over 1,500 miles in 45 days. There, they reproduce in the Sea’s free floating sargassum seaweed and die. Their tiny, transparent larvae are then carried by the prevailing currents towards their future freshwater habitats.

_{Capt. Owen Clark hauling eel pots. Image by author.}

But their transformation has only started. Along the way, the clear, leaf-shaped juveniles develop into larger “glass” eels, and as they gain pigmentation, they are referred to as “elvers.” Finally, as they travel into the Chesapeake and head towards the freshwater headwaters where they’ll live their adult lives, they become muscular, snake-like, and take their familiar form as “yellow” eel. In this stage, they may travel thousands of miles seeking a permanent home. Thanks to their thick, slimy coating, they are capable of moving overland, across dams or snags, or through dry environments until they reach their destination. There, they’ll live for up to 20 years, feeding at night and hibernating over winter in frozen, shallow marshes or ponds.

The historic eel fishery capitalized on different parts of the eel life cycle. Large, sexually mature “silver” eels were harvested during their migration downstream in fall. Yellow eel, elvers and glass eel were harvested in the springtime, as their offspring returned to the Chesapeake’s waterways. To catch the fish, an unusually universal language of fishing gear and traditions developed. The main tools, cylindrical woven pots and spears or eel forks—could be found with only fairly small deviations in 16th century America used by indigenous fishermen, 17th century England on the Thames, and in 20th century America by watermen.

Chesapeake Native Americans used basket weaving techniques to shape oak splints around wooden forms, crafting tightly-woven eel pots that were baited and used with weirs or in open water to catch eels. At the same time on the other side of the world, Thames fisherman were weaving eel “bucks” or traps out of willow that looked and functioned in pretty much the same way. Remarkably, the eel pot’s essential form has remained fairly unchanged throughout the centuries. Onboard Capt. Owen Clark’s Aluminator, the pots today are metal and cloth, but the shape and use is almost identical to what an 18th century Bay fisherman would have utilized.

For several centuries, the eel harvest in the Chesapeake was ascendent. Part of a seasonal harvest largely in spring and fall, eel were easily preserved with smoke or salt for winter food stores. Eel pots captured eel moving throughout the waterways, while eel forks allowed eelers to spear hibernating eel in frozen marshes or ponds. The thriving population of eel also made them frequent bycatch in other fisheries, and the surplus catch was salted, cut into chunks, and used as bait fish for large-scale commercial fisheries like blue crabs.

_{Eel pots on the deck of the Aluminator. Image by author.}

Ironically, the eel pot may prove more enduring than the American eel fishery itself. Since the 18th century, beginning with the creation of dams to power gristmills, the relentless damming of American waterways for industry, energy, and mills has taken an enormous toll on eel populations. Eel numbers began to decline in the late 20th century. The 1979 Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission estimated that while fishermen coast-wide landed 3.67 million pounds of eels, by 2002, the number had dropped to 700,000. According to the USFWS, only 12 percent of Mid-Atlantic waterways are navigable before eels reach a dam. In the Chesapeake, keystone rivers like the Susquehanna were dammed numerous times, barricading eel from their natural habitat.

While American eel numbers are declining, the demand for eel has never been higher. Starting in the 1980’s and intensifying in the 2000’s, the export markets to Asia transformed the fishery for eel from a mainly baitfish industry into an international juggernaut almost overnight. Asian eel populations had long been prized as a food fish, especially in Japan. But the voracious demand for eel outstripped the dwindling Asian eel stocks. Exportation of American eel created a mini-boom for the Chesapeake eel fishery. It also raised the price of eel out of reach as a bait fish, and watermen turned to more affordable alternatives like razor clams. For a short time, eelers like Capt. Owen Clark enjoyed an eel renaissance, as wholesalers paid top dollar to export their yellow and silver eels to Japan.

The development of a Chinese aquaculture method to “finish” American glass eels to maturity in tanks spelled the end of the Chesapeake’s mini-boom. Just as quickly as it had started, the demand shifted away from Maryland, where only yellow eels of 9” or more are legal to harvest. Today, only 40% of Clark’s eel catch will be sold for consumption in overseas markets—the rest will be sold as bait for anglers catching rockfish.

Though the eel fishery today is a shadow of what it once was—Owen estimates he’s one of three or four working eelers left on the Upper Chesapeake—the traditions of eeling are being carefully revived. In the Patawomeck Tribe of Northern Virginia, tribal member and archaeologist Dr. Brad Hatch has been hosting a series of eel pot workshops to keep his cultural tradition alive. Working with oak splints harvested from nearby forests, Dr. Hatch is passing the art weaving of eel pots down to the next generation. The Maryland State Arts Council’s Maryland Traditions program has also supported eel pot apprenticeships with eel pot craftsmen like Melvin Hickman of Cambridge, Maryland.

_{Capt. Clark and crew fishing for eel on the Elk River. Image by author.}

Back on the Bohemia, Capt. Owen is wrapping up his day. The wind has picked up and the swells have started in earnest, but he and his crew of two have gotten in a good day’s harvest. Working as a team of three in an easy rhythm, they pull up hundreds of pots full of thrashing, wriggling eels, dump them into the Aluminator’s live well, and re-bait and stack the pots. Once back at the dock, Owen pumps the boat’s livewell into holding tanks in his truck for transport. In a huge rush, the eels flood out, yellow and silver, gleaming in the November sun. A tradition old as time, big as the world, eeling and the rich culture it created perseveres, enduring and enigmatic as the eels themselves.

_{This article was originally published in the Chesapeake Log.}

_{“Tomato boat at Quaker Neck” by Emma Hess Ingersoll (1878-1941).}

_{Courtesy Chesapeake Heartland archive.}

In the little riverfront town of Crumpton, Maryland in the 1930’s, summer meant tomato time. Local fields were bursting with the red, ripe fruit, and on the waterfront, the local cannery hired scores of workers and started up its steaming, thumping canning equipment. At high season, the river would be thickly red with tomato skins, dumped into the water and washed out with the tide. The entire community pitched in and got paid, including my grandfather and his whole family.

Throughout the Chesapeake, in big cities like Baltimore and small towns like Crumpton, tomato packing was a way of life and a source of income every summer from the 19th century into the 20th. Today, the only parts of this seasonal industry to survive are the dilapidated husks of the old canneries, quietly collapsing along the Bay’s small tributaries. Most are already gone forever. But for three generations, canning operations big and small fed the country a miracle food—seasonless tomatoes.

It’s hard to imagine now, when tomatoes are in so many of the dishes we consider distinctly American, but tomatoes were johnny-come-latelies to the American palate. One of the first foods—along with potatoes and peppers—from the New World to reach Europe after colonization, tomatoes took a while to catch on. A member of the nightshade family, tomatoes were embraced as an ornamental plant but treated with skepticism as a food. But eventually the Italians, French, and Spanish were won over by the tomato’s delicious versatility—the French, no surprise, insisted tomatoes were aphrodisiacs—and brought their recipes and demand for tomatoes with them as American immigrants in the early 19th century.

By the time that Mary Randolph included 17 recipes for tomato-based dishes in the 1824 edition of The Virginia House-Wife, American tomato mania was well underway. Tomatoes were the basis for sauces, soups, main and side dishes, and flavorful condiments like ketchup and marmalade. Snake oil salesmen even touted their health benefits and sold tomato pills. “In taking retrospect of the last 18 years,” commented one writer in 1858 of the tomato, “there is no vegetable on the catalogue that has obtained such popularity in so short a period…in ten years, almost every variety of pill and panacea was extract of tomato. It…is now cultivated the length and breadth of the country.” But the growing season for tomatoes was frustratingly short, and fresh tomatoes, even when coaxed into early or late fruiting, were insufficient to meet the intense national demand.

Just as the 19th century tomato craze took off, new canning technology was developed in France and introduced to the US. Regionally, it first became widespread in the 1850’s as an oyster preservation method, but was easily adapted to fruits and vegetables in the warmer seasons. The Mid Atlantic, with its long, sultry summers and rich soil, was an ideal location for cultivating all sorts of produce—peaches had a shining moment—but it was the growing, packing and shipping of tomatoes that made Delmarva famous.

_{Phillips Packing Company postcard, collections of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum}

Canneries popped up along the Chesapeake’s waterways and the new railroad lines, utilizing workboats, steamboats and trains to transport fresh fruit or cans of summer tomatoes. Canning equipment was relatively inexpensive for enterprising would-be cannery operators, and even small Maryland towns like Crumpton, Trappe, Centreville, and Princess Anne all had operational canneries for decades. Caroline County alone had 62 small mom-and-pop canneries. The canneries were serviced by local farmers who transported their ripe crop to market in buyboats, skipjacks, farm carts, or later, trucks.

Labor, too, was mostly local and integrated—unusual in Jim Crow era Maryland, where small towns often were deeply segregated. When tomatoes came into season, farmers and canneries alike would hire local Black and white workers or in some cases, migrant labor, to pick the fruit, sort it, peel it, and can it. A peeler could earn $.05 a bucket in the 1920’s, and a skilled peeler might earn as much as $5 per day while tomatoes were in season. Gladys Jenkins, a peeler at Trappe’s Defender packing company, later said, “I always looked forward to tomato season, it was a time I could make a little money.”

_{Tomato production at Phillips Packing Co., Library of Congress Collections}

In the early years of the tomato industry, there was no single kind of tomato grown for the canning market. Like apples, tomatoes were richly cultivated in a diverse range of colors and flavor profiles to suit different climates, growing and fruiting times, and taste preferences. Varieties like Red Rock, Greater Baltimore, Royal Red, Perfection, Paragon, and dozens of others were grown specifically for canning. But there was increasingly an industry push to standardize the tomato—to reject the lumpy, bumpy, colorful diversity for a round, bright red, uniform fruit. In the quest to develop an “ideal” specimen, the canning industry set the narrow standard for what we expect of our tomatoes even today. Only in the last few decades have home gardeners pushed to bring back those delicious, unbeautiful varieties we almost lost along the way.

The tomato packing industry created several stand-out companies whose names we still recognize—Campbells Soup in New Jersey, which started out as a tomato cannery—and Phillips Seafood, once the canning juggernaut of the Chesapeake. Established in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1902, Phillips Packing and Seafood Company was the nucleus of a company town and one of the largest food processors in the nation. At its height in WWII, the business employed approximately a quarter of all Cambridge residents. Packing fruit, vegetables, oysters and crabs, the business was primarily known for tomato canning and ketchup, giving Cambridge the nickname, “tomato canning capital of the world.”

_{Tomato production at Phillips Packing Co., Library of Congress Collections}

A 1922 Baltimore Sun article described the packing process at Phillips. “Wagons are driven up to the end of a machine in a tunnel-like casing. The ‘tomats’ are dumped from the basket to a perforated moving platform. They look very pretty as they move into a steaming wash. After the bath, they get a-boiling before a cold plunge helps their agony.” For the final stages of the process, “the tomatoes are dumped into wire baskets and given to skinners. After skinning, another cooking comes, then cans waiting in a long row. Cans are sealed as they pass by. When they are labeled and boxed the operation is complete.”

World War II spelled the last great era of tomato packing in the Chesapeake. Packinghouse production accelerated overnight to meet the armed forces’ enormous demand for shelf-stable food. The War Production Board released a statement: “There is a need for every case of tomatoes and peas that can be packaged in 1942.” Government ration contracts ultimately claimed 35% of Maryland’s tomato production. To meet the production demands during wartime when most workers were enlisted, canneries like Phillips hired women and for the first time, non-US immigrant labor. Some tomato farms and packing houses were even allotted prisoners of war to supplement their labor force, like the 25 German POWs who worked for Talbot County’s Defender Packing Company.

_{Defender brand tomato label, author’s collection.}

The quest for a 12-month tomato growing season and the rise of frozen foods spelled the end of the Chesapeake’s tomato era. Tomato production began to decentralize, moving to California and later, Mexico. Consumer tastes were also changing, and fresh frozen vegetables and fruit were increasingly preferred over canned goods. For the region’s canneries, who lacked the capital for the costly upgrades needed to freeze and ship frozen food, it was the end. One by one, they shuttered, and fields that once produced tomatoes for the nation grew the corn, wheat and soybeans you see throughout the region today.

Phillips Packing and Seafood Company was one of the outlying survivors. As their canning business waned and was ultimately bought by Consolidated Foods, the family expanded into the seafood side of the business. Beginning with one Ocean City restaurant, Phillips would eventually become a leading name in the Chesapeake again—this time for their iconic seafood restaurants, packaged crab meat, and cans of crab soup.

_{Tomato production at Phillips Packing Co., Library of Congress Collections}

Though the last remnants of Delmarva’s once-mighty tomato industry are gone, in the tomato town of Cambridge, Maryland, the history of the Phillips era lives on. Phillips Packing Plant F has been recently restored through a partnership between the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy and Cross Street Partners. Derelict for years, the space is now a light-filled community hub with restaurants, a microbrewery, an oyster bar, and a food and farming exchange. Its signature smokestack stands proudly over the town, a testament to the enduring legacy of Delmarva’s tomato golden age.

_{This article was originally published by Edible Delmarva.}

By Kate Livie

The Eastern Shore is known to change slowly. We love our traditions here, and cleave to them passionately—a characteristic of the native Eastern Shoreman that can be charming even as it prevents progress. But good things can come out of this stewardship of the past. One of the very best Eastern Shore traditions that’s been preserved might be the log canoe races on summer weekends: throwbacks to the Chesapeake’s golden age of sail race on the Chester, Miles, Tred Avon or Corsica rivers. Lavishly overpowered with huge sails, these elegant anachronisms are balanced with human ballast in competitions that could have taken place anytime in the last 150 years.

It makes sense that somebody like Francis “Franny” Schauber would own one of these beautiful time travelers. Listening to Schauber talk is a little like reading Gilbert Byron’s book, The Lord’s Oysters. Born in 1946, when the Chesapeake was still a place where the rivers served as roads, he’s about as classic an Eastern Shoreman as they come. Schauber was raised in Chestertown, Md., and spent his boyhood hanging out around boats crabbing and hunting. In 1963 as a teenager in the Sea Scouts, he was introduced to log canoes through his friend/partner in crime, Sonny Usilton, and then-sportswriter for the Kent County News, Hurtt Deringer. Both happened to crew for a local vessel called Mystery on summer races and thought Schauber might like to try it. Little did he know then that his new hobby would shape the path of his entire life, and preserve an important part of Chesapeake heritage along the way.

Mystery is a vessel with a long history in the log canoe world. One of 20 plus log canoes in the contemporary racing fleet, Mystery was built for one reason—racing. Unlike the dual-purpose 19th century log canoes that straddled the line between watermen’s workboat and yachtsman’s plaything, Mystery was no hybrid. Constructed in 1932 by Price Sinclair Builders in Oxford, Md., it was built for Easton’s John D. Williams to add to his collection of racing log canoes. Williams was an undertaker and antiques dealer by day, a pragmatic combination that allowed him to bury clients and then sell their belongings. The rest of the time, he pursued his passion for log canoe racing.

Williams and many of his early 20th century cohort represented the johnny-come-latelies of the log canoe world, a patrician class capable of investing thousands of dollars in pleasure craft. It was a new sort of owner for a new version of the sport, one that was started by watermen in the mid-19th century but by the beginning of the 1900s had largely become the realm of the monied class.

Williams and the early 20th century canoes he commissioned—Jay Dee and Mystery—were recent arrivals to the centuries-old log canoe world. With origins in the dugout canoes of the region’s Native Americans, log canoes are the Chesapeake’s original boat. Colonists and their descendents added sails, but didn’t change much about the original form—there wasn’t much to improve upon for the easy-to-build, easy-to-sail, easy-to-maneuver vessel. In the Chesapeake of the 19th century, before engines or cars, log canoes were the gold standard for working on the water or getting from place to place. And just like two pickup trucks idling at a red light, log canoes could turn from workhorse to drag racers on a whim.

According to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s Chief Curator, Pete Lesher, the first documented log canoe race was in 1859—but the sport likely started long before then as oystermen raced back to harbor, or raced just for fun. By the turn of the century, however, watermen were upgrading their old sailing log canoes with practical in-board engines—a technological advance that almost spelled the end of the era of log canoe races. But in the meantime, the sport had become beloved by yachtsmen, who were able to bring back log canoe racing.

“It was a revival driven by nostalgia and regional identity,” Lesher said. “And the need to create enough sailing log canoes for the critical mass that drives racing. For example, the establishment of the Miles River Yacht Club is really motivated by a desire to formalize and sustain the sport. When the MRYC creates the Governor’s Cup, that provides an even stronger incentive for the patrician class to commission new log canoes and to restore old ones to sail power.” Ever since, watermen and working class people have been a minority in the log canoe world.

All of this makes Schauber’s ownership of Mystery unique. For almost 50 years, the canoe has been lovingly maintained and raced by Schauber and his wife, Suzy, who also own and operate Schauber’s Lumbermill near Crumpton, Md. That Mystery is a boat owned by working people is an important distinction to the Schaubers. “We were outsiders, we were all farm boys when I started racing Mystery,” Franny Schauber said. “All those people down there in St. Michaels and Oxford that raced them, I wasn’t in their circle. I was an outsider…I still think they see me as an outsider.”

When Franny Schauber started crewing on Mystery as a teenager, the canoe was only a year out from winning the coveted Governor’s Cup in 1962. Though originally built as a secret weapon to defeat Flying Cloud in that race (it was named Mystery for the secrecy around the build), it had taken almost 30 years to sail to victory under the ownership of John Whittum. During Schauber’s early days crewing on the boat, Whittum was often in Steamboat Springs, Col., where he worked as a teacher. Summers off meant Whittum returned in time for the racing season, but eventually Schauber took on maintenance of Mystery during the off season on a makeshift railway at Whittum’s property. Other upgrades followed, including a new, taller mast that allowed for larger sails and impressive speeds. “For a few years there, we were pretty hot,” Scahuber said. By 1976, Whittum had less time and financial resources to direct toward the canoe. That’s when Schauber and his wife stepped in to take over.

The couple had met through log canoe racing in 1966. Suzy’s father was a member of MRYC and Franny met her on the yacht club porch, where she was reading the Grapes of Wrath. Their romance always included loe canoes, and Mystery became an important part of their courtship and early marriage. Outside of the racing season, Suzy and Franny sailed Mystery for fun, taking out friends and having adventures. It seemed natural to assume ownership of the log canoe that meant so much to them. “He told us, make me any offer,” Schauber said. “The boat was sitting down at Grey’s Inn Creek [a tributary of the Chester River]. We ended up buying it for a couple thousand bucks, and then we put a lot of work into it.”

Mystery was showing its age and needed to be rebuilt, so the Schaubers put the canoe on a trailer and eventually moved it to their new business, a lumber mill located between Chestertown and Crumpton in Queen Anne’s County, Md. Ironically, even that endeavor was influenced by Mystery. Schauber had spent so many years sourcing wood to repair the log canoe that he’d built up a robust network of log sources and mills on the Eastern Shore.

“Fran was in charge of hunting up [lumber] if Mystery broke a bowsprit or something, white oak, longleaf yellow pine, stuff like that,” Suzy Schauber said. “He was wheeling and dealing with a little sawmill owned by an Amish family near the Benedictine School in Ridgley, Md., and when the Amish family moved to Kentucky, we bought the sawmill from them in 1974. Before they left, Fran asked them to train him how to saw. And that’s how Fran and I owned our first sawmill.”

The ownership of the sawmill was serendipitous, because Mystery needed a lot of work and the only way to accomplish that on a budget was for Fran, Suzy, and the crew to do a lot of it themselves. After having Mystery sit out the racing season for a few years, they shored up the hull to get it back into the fleet. With help from friends Jim Stevenson and Mike Dickinson, they took Mystery down to its original five logs and glued them together with white cedar and West System epoxy. “Mystery doesn’t have any fiberglass, to this day,” Schauber said.

Over the years, Schauber estimates that they’ve rebuilt Mystery twice, and thanks to their lumber mill, the log canoe has been maintained with the best wood the Eastern Shore can provide. “It’s got sassafras decks, white cedar and cypress encasing. Those original logs are rotted, deteriorated, but they are still there, sealed in epoxy,” Schauber said. “I built the mast and designed the rudder.” And Schauber isn’t done yet. As of the time of this interview, he was hard at work to build new centerboards.

Log canoes are expensive to maintain and sail, even if you do much of the work yourself. And that’s the biggest change in log canoes Schauber has observed during his 60 years racing them. “Now, you gotta have money,” Schauber said. “Today it’s a money sport. There’s nobody like me that does everything himself. Every board in Mystery I cut down and timbered myself—we did it all. We’ve never put it in a boatyard.” From sails to transportation costs, tenders to insurance, log canoe ownership has only become more expensive—prohibitively so for racing newcomers whose passion for log canoes might run deeper than their pockets. “You have to persevere to buy a log canoe. There’s so much time and money required. I’ve known so many canoes that died in people’s backyards because they didn’t have thousands of dollars to rebuild them.”

The Schaubers might be a dying breed within the racing community, but their enthusiasm for another racing season is evergreen. Mystery has been a part of the Schauber family since the very beginning, and it’s clear that they’ve had a lot of fun owning it. “Mystery is our log canoe and our boat,” Suzy said. “We used to sail it to race weekends with the mainmast in the foremast spot and a small sail on. We’d take two dozen eggs, scrapple, bing cherries, and a huge frying pan and cook these hellacious regatta breakfasts. One New Year’s Day, we even sailed it up to Chestertown from Rolph’s Wharf [on the Chester River] and had a champagne toast out on the water.”

“We’re coming up on 50 years of marriage, and Mystery has been a big part of that,” Franny Schauber said. Suzy agrees. “Mystery is our little child that has grown up with us. John Whittum’s mother used to call me ‘Mother of Mystery.’”

There’s joy in being the man of Mystery as well. “I like to race on it, and I like to see it win. I’ve known hundreds of people that have raced on Mystery with me—judges, lawyers, farmers. And now I have the children of the people I was racing with in the ‘60s out on it.” When asked if he sees an end in sight, Franny Schauber doesn’t answer directly, as is his way. “I’ll keep … racing as long as I can.”

Note: this post was first published in the Chesapeake Log, the former magazine of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.