Echoes Forward

If you’re a warm-weather person like me, then you are probably reveling in the start of summer. To celebrate, let’s go over a very general history of the Eastern Shore delicacy we’ve been waiting all year to get our claws on: the Maryland Blue Crab.
People of the Chesapeake Bay have been eating crabs forever – literally. According to the Smithsonian, researchers once assumed that Native Americans and early colonists didn’t consume a great deal of crabs due to a lack of crustacean-related remains at archaeological dig sites. Denton is a perfect example of this: only one centuries-old crab claw was found at a site along the Choptank River on what was a late 18th century tavern, which may have you think they ate that one crab leg and decided not to try again until Old Bay was invented. But as it turns out, crab shells are simply more likely to break down or get carried away by other animals, so it wasn’t that the Native Americans or colonists weren’t eating them. In fact, they were eating a lot of them.
Today’s archaeological evidence suggests that Natives at least as early as the 1500s were chowing down on some crab legs. A 1704 treaty written between the colony of Maryland and the Nanticoke tribe near the Choptank River specifically noted that the Nanticokes were allowed to continue freely “hunting, crabbing, fowling and fishing,” signifying that crabs were an important part of their diet. And somebody had to show the colonists - the original “chicken-neckers” - how to catch them.
Seafood was popular in the early days because it was plentiful and easily accessible. That being said, commercial ventures were not yet popular, so crabs and other seafood were simply an option for sustenance. If you want an example of how those of high social stature would have enjoyed their crabs back in colonial times, here’s an excerpt from a 1685 recipe book, The Accomplist Cook by Robert May:
“To fry Crabs
Take the meat out of the great claws being first boiled, flour and fry them and take the meat out of the body strain half if it for sauce, and the other half to fry, and mix it with grated bread, almond paste, nutmeg, salt, and yolks of eggs, fry in clarified butter, being first dipped in batter, put in a spoonful at a time; then make sauce with wine-vinegar, butter, or juyce of orange, and grated nutmeg, beat up the butter thick, and put some of the meat that was strained into the sauce, warm it and put it in a clean dish, lay the meat on the sauce, slices of orange over all, and run it over with beaten butter, fryed parasley, round the dish brim, and the little legs round the meat.”
As time went on, the Shore’s population grew. More people meant more businesses, a more stabilized economy, and overall a shift from a sparse group of “living-off-the-land” sustenance farmers to real towns and cities. But it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1800s that commercial fishing, oystering, and crabbing became somewhat accessible trades for regular folks. Until then, only the wealthy could afford the equipment necessary to haul in large quantities of seafood, and they usually had promised their catch to a buyer rather than taking it to an open market (for example, many struck deals with plantation owners who bought it to feed their enslaved people). So, even still, if you wanted a crab feast, you had to catch the crabs yourself. A popular pastime in Caroline County was “crabbing parties”, where a large group of locals would take out-of-towners on a crabbing expedition on the Choptank and then steam the day’s catch for their supper right on the riverbanks or dock – hoping to give their guests a true Eastern Shore experience. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, local newspapers regularly updated residents on the status of the crab population and where they could be reliably caught.
The expansion of the blue crab industry occurred in the 1870s, when refrigerated train cars came about. This meant that the blue crab no longer belonged strictly to locals. The trotline method replaced older techniques - almost all of which involved using a big net and wishful thinking - around this time as well. The first box car containing soft-shell Chesapeake Bay crabs arrived in Philadelphia in 1873 or 1874. According to sources from the time, people were slow to warm up to the idea of eating crabs because they believed they were poisonous.
Whatever failed to sell at the market landed in the hands of railroad employees, who were some of the first outsiders to try crabs. After convincing their friends and family to try the very ugly yet tasty creatures, crabs finally became somewhat nationally popular – and tourists have been using crab mallets wrong ever since.
Canning crab meat first began on the Eastern Shore in 1878. Still, the negative stigma around crabs led it to be a less-than-profitable business in the beginning. If you were wondering, the prices at the time were 25 cents a dozen for soft-shells and 10 cents a dozen for hard-shell crabs. By 1901, Maryland had 5,000 or so soft-crabbers and over 1,000 trotliners. Those who didn’t trotline for hard crabs instead used scrape nets. And finally, in 1902, gas-powered motors could be added to crabbing boats, which greatly increased their speed and efficiency. It was also around 1902 that crabbing “seasons” began to be instituted on the Shore.
The crab pot was first invented in Virginia in 1928, although a more refined version of it didn’t start being used around here until after 1938. If it weren’t for the Great Depression and World War II, the crabbing industry could very well have continued to accelerate and have exhausted the crab population completely. But those two major events negatively impacted national demand for crabs - either due to poverty or less men in the homeland to catch and eat them - and crabs once again were primarily consumed by locals.
Commercial crabbing hit its second stride after the war, with many of the new technologies and techniques learned by building war machines now being applied to American industrial technology, crabbing gear included. According to an article published by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, “within 5 years [after the end of WWII], crab harvest increased 10 million pounds annually.” In a 1954 television program called “Industry on Parade” (very similar to today’s “Dirty Jobs”), the show visits an Eastern Shore crab processing plant. There, crabs brought in by independent watermen are sorted and steamed, then picked for their meat by a crew of African American women in dresses and aprons. As the 1950s version of Mike Lowe says, “the women who do the picking wield their special knives with the speed and accuracy of surgeons.” It has been said that the crabbers were in constant competition to get their daily catch and get back to shore as fast as possible, as the first boats in got the best prices for their product from the distribution companies. In many ways, commercial crabbing and packaging looks similar today.
Throughout our history, crabs have been enjoyed by pretty much any group living near the Bay: Native Americans, early colonists, enslaved people, poor and working-class people of all races, the elite, you name it. Even while George Washington was sitting under his own vine and fig tree at Mount Vernon, he was eating blue crabs. And those who weren’t eating them were catching them, canning them, or selling them. The point is, crabs have always had a way of bringing folks together from all walks of life and connecting us to the land.
On that note, I would like to offer this thought: do we deal with the impracticality of eating crabs because they truly taste that delicious, or do we eat crabs because it is perhaps the highest form of fellowship you can get outside a church? While other folks across America have to wait until November for a yearly feast with their closest friends and family, all we have to do is call around and say ‘hey, I got a bushel of crabs, why don’t you come over and help me eat them?’ a few times a summer. I’ll carry on the tradition if you will.