Traditionally, African-American neighborhoods were tucked away from the waterfront, so if you want to look for traces of the Downings’ lifetime on Chincoteague, you may go farther inland to larger floor exactly where the Union Baptist and Christ United Methodist church buildings are. A neighborhood podcast collection termed The Bivalve Trail even further describes Thomas Downing’s story on Chincoteague, subsequent his journey all the way to New York.
Several years right after Downing uncovered to tong oysters on Virginia’s Jap Shore, the broader Chesapeake location became just one of the greatest producers of oysters in North The us. That altered in the 1970s and ’80s when the annual harvest sharply declined from the much more than 25 million pounds that Virginia and Maryland experienced been creating just a 10 years or so before. A combination of overharvesting as properly as a surge of waterborne ailment led to the depletion of the region’s oyster reefs, which, despite ongoing attempts to revitalize them, are still significantly from their peak. Both Maryland and Virginia, at the time titans of wild oyster manufacturing, now flip out less than 250,000 pounds a yr.
So it’s not stunning that the area has pivoted to aquaculture. Oyster farmers have largely replaced oyster tongers, and whilst elevating oysters does not change the question that comes with unearthing shells from a wild reef, the observe will allow farmers to protect oyster seed from predators, condition and even the simple risk of tender mud, which, supplied the absence of a hardened reef, could bury and suffocate an oyster.
In New York, a storied 19th-century oyster cellar
When Downing moved to New York City in 1819, he promptly turned acquainted with the Hudson River, the place he fixated on getting the ideal of the very best on the New Jersey side of the river. Downing knew that oysters had been sought immediately after in New York, and he made good friends rapidly and patrons speedier. At some point he opened his have cellar, Downing’s Oyster Household, on Wide Street in 1825, wherever he’d serve Charles Dickens and a complete planet of white elites. Even Queen Victoria ate oysters despatched to her by Downing.
The society encompassing oysters started shifting throughout the 19th century. There ended up the blue-collar oystermen that Downing still left guiding on Virginia’s Japanese Shore, but New York Town had its possess oystermen who would completely transform their houses into eating cellars for those people seeking a no-frills meal refreshing from the sea.
When Downing arrived in New York, oyster cellars — several of them Black-operated and supplied by Black oystermen — have been presently well known, but they have been not regarded respectable locations for really serious eating. Downing considered that he could distinguish himself by attractive to the businessmen in the Money District. With price savings from many years of operating as an oysterman in Philadelphia and New York, he adorned his cafe with damask curtains, a chandelier and fantastic carpeting. In the night, businessmen would even carry their wives to Downing’s, which was significant because oyster houses ordinarily weren’t imagined of as “proper.”
His restaurant flourished. The new eating haven signaled a shift in the way individuals perceived oysters, both of those as a food items and social practical experience. It is this complexity in the cultural interpretation of oysters and the way they’ve been represented in excess of time that fascinates me.
