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An Essay on the Oyster Industry of the United States.
New York: The McWilliams Printing House, Printers and Publishers, 81 and 83 Elm Street, 1885. 8vo (9” x 5.75”), original printed gray wrappers, [2] pp. ads, [3]–79 pp., b&w illus. Early ownership stamp in red at top of first page: “Geo. R. Rush, M.D., U.S. Navy, Sayvills Long Island, New York.” CONDITION: Very good-, wrapper mostly perished at spine and upper wrap mostly detached, a few initial leaves dog-eared at top. A scarce and sweeping survey of the racially diverse oyster industry on America’s northeastern seaboard, including everything from statistics to anatomy, cookery and poetry, published during “the great oyster craze” by an advocate of federal regulation to protect the fishery from over-harvesting. This volume by Connecticut native W. B. Hopson opens with a poem (unsigned, though apparently of Hopson’s composition) ventriloquizing the ruminations of an oyster, as well as “A Soliloquy” praising that “ne plus ultra of the crustaceans” and marveling at the progress in its cultivation. The bulk of Hopson’s work covers oyster varieties, cultivation (including the practice of oyster “drinking”), regulation, and trade in Connecticut, New York, and the Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bays. Of this last market—a racially-diverse center of the deadly Oyster Wars through the 1850s, and still an area of social and regulatory trouble—Hopson has a great deal to say, and none of it good: “The oystermen of the Chesapeake are, as a class, illiterate, indolent and improvident…” He outlines the industry’s competing (not to say hostile) means of harvesting, as well as its racial composition (for instance, “The tongmen…have a monopoly in Virginia, and are consequently much more numerous than in Maryland, with their number reaching 9,860, of which 5,906 are negroes and 2,954 are whites…”). A scientific case study in the form of diary excerpts recording the cultivation experiments of Captain Charles H. Townsend of South Haven, Connecticut includes detailed data on sourcing, planting, transplanting, and harvesting oysters. Hopson also covers shipping (“seed oysters” to California and barrels of oysters to Europe), as well as oyster anatomy and life-cycle (including “Enemies,” such as starfishes), and, finally, six recipes—“Hints Regarding Cooking Oysters”—by stewing, frying, broiling, and so on, provided by “Mr. T. W. Wilson, of the firm of Dorlon & Shaffer, whose reputation for cooking, serving and handling the delicious bivalves is second to none in the world.” Several illustrations throughout the work show oysters and their predators, as well as various oystering vessels and establishments. W. B. Hopson edited The Sea World, Grocer and Packer’s Journal (advertised on the first page here as “the only paper in America devoted to the fish, oyster and canned goods industries”) and was active throughout the 1880s and ’90s promoting and organizing the oyster industry and communicating the need for “some kind of legislation” to prevent “the native beds of the country [from being] destroyed” (“Oysters And Their Beds”). The original owner of this volume, George R. Brush, was a surgeon and medical inspector in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and owned land near Long Island’s Great South Bay, a famous oystering area. OCLC records just five holdings, at Washington State Library, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Trinity College, Yale, and the American Museum of Natural History. No copies recorded at auction. A rare work on the American oyster industry, as well as its natural and socio-economic ecology in the late nineteenth century. REFERENCES: Stevenson, Charles H. A Bibliography of Publications in the English Language Relative to Oysters and the Oyster Industries, appendix to the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Part XVIII. Report of the Commissioner for the year ending June 30, 1892 (Washington, DC: 1894), 1885j; “Oyster And Their Beds,” Connecticut Western News (Salisbury, CT), October 3, 1883, p. 4; “The Oystermen’s Picnic,” The Day (New London, CT), August 17, 1881, p. 4; “The Oyster,” Dollar Weekly News (Bridgeton, NJ), November 7, 1885, p. 12; MacKenzie, Clyde L., Jr. “History of Oystering in the United States and Canada, Featuring the Eight Greatest Oyster Estuaries,” Marine Fisheries Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 (1996).
Item #9695
Price: $950.00
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