Hand tongs, in use since the early 1700s, extended human reach to oysters too deep to gather by hand. A hundred years later, dredges—so efficient they had already scraped clean the oyster bars in Long Island Sound—arrived on the Bay from New England. But still some oysters remained too deep for tonging and legally off-limits to dredges. With the invention of mechanical patent tongs in 1887, oystermen harvested these protected oysters too.
To learn more about the depletion of the Chesapeake oysters and the men who used these tools, visit the Oystering on the Chesapeake exhibit.
|Marker Condition||No reports yet|
|Date Added||Wednesday, September 24th, 2014 at 12:56pm PDT -07:00|
|UTM (WGS84 Datum)||18S E 394075 N 4293868|
|Decimal Degrees||38.78720000, -76.21960000|
|Degrees and Decimal Minutes||N 38° 47.232', W 76° 13.176'|
|Degrees, Minutes and Seconds||38° 47' 13.92" N, 76° 13' 10.56" W|
|Driving Directions||Google Maps|
|Closest Postal Address||At or near 100 North Ln, St Michaels MD 21663, US|
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