Owns Big Oyster Farm
The man who has discovered the secret of successful oyster cultivation, is in town.
He is Gen. W. A. Jones, of Fowling Point Island, Nassawadox, Va., and he and Mrs. Jones are at the Stafford. General Jones is a retired brigadier-general of the United States Army Engineer Corps, having been retired in 1905. For several years prior to 1905 General Jones had charge of the Baltimore harbor and bay lighthouse service, and is well acquainted with many Baltimoreans.
Several years before he was retired General Jones bought Fowling Point Island and started an oyster farm, "too keep out of mischief after he lost his job." He seems to have hit upon the secret of oyster raising instinctively. It is the following rule: "Make the oystermen and your other neighbors your friends."
General Jones has adhered strictly to the rule from the first day he started his enterprise, and the result has been that for miles around all who know him are his loyal friends. A citizen of Baltimore and a friend of the General's, in speaking of his success, said yesterday:
"General Jones is the first man to solve the oyster problem. I have known men who laid out farms and had every inch of their territory robbed by oystermen because they had incurred the hostility of the oystermen by having some of their number arrested for stealing. General Jones never had one arrested. His lawyers wanted to put some of them in jail, but the General forbade it. He said he had bought his home to live there among the people and he didn't want them to be his enemies. He couldn't get his oysters back and it wouldn't do the oysterman any good to go to jail, he contended. The result is that they are his friends. He lends them money, goes to see them if they are sick and need his help and is their adviser in many things. Other oyster planters have had oystermen arrested for trespassing, and I have known their friends to go miles out of their way to destroy the property of these planters. General Jones has discovered the secret of success."
More Than 100 Acres Of Natural Bed
General Jones' home and oyster farm is on Fowling Point Island; which is three and a half miles long, and which is in Broadwater sound, about 20 miles north of Cape Charles, on the ocean side of the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
"The farm has a capacity of 100,000 bushels of oysters a year, and I expect that size crop next year," General Jones said, sitting in the lobby of the Stafford. "This year I have harvested 16,000 bushels, and expect that many more in the next two months. Last year, which was my first crop, I got 12,000. I have more than 100 acres of natural bed, or rock, and am continually making artificial rock with shells. My farm is peculiarly adapted for oyster farming, as the bottom is free from water at low tide. As the owner of the island I have the riparian rights along the shore, which gives me title to the bottom as far as a mile from shore at some places, the distance the tide recedes. I make artificial rock by dumping shells in piles over the bared bottom. The spat take hold of the shells, and after they begin to take form I have the shells scattered on the bottom between the piles. That gives the spat an opportunity to fasten on the shells in the pile which had been covered by those above them. The riparian rights of owners of shore along the Chesapeake extend only a few feet from high-tide line, but oyster cultivation can be carried on just as successfully in the Chesapeake as at my farm. The only difference is in that I can gather my crop by having it picked off the bottom when the tide is out.
"The main difficulty I see in the way of successful cultivation in Maryland is the law and the spirit of the oyster tongers. Only a vigorous campaign of education and a strict enforcement of necessary laws will make oyster cultivation successful. The oysterman thinks the water is free and he can take oysters wherever he will, no matter who planted them. Your labor and expense on a bottom are not to be respected as your labor and expense on a potato patch. The oysterman must be educated to see that a bay full of oysters every year is better than a good crop in spots some years and a bad crop in spots in other years. The oysterman doesn't respect a man's right to an oyster crop unless the owner is there with a gun.
No Business For Poor Man.
"Another great difficulty is in the section of the law prohibiting one man from acquiring a vast area of bottom. That is to be regretted, for oyster cultivation is not a business for a poor man, living from hand to mouth. It costs money to start a farm, and a watchman must be paid to keep out thieves. A poor man, with five acres of bottom, can't afford to pay a watchman, and he can't watch himself, for he must be out making a living during the three years that his crop is growing. Ten acres of first-class bottom is not large enough to pay a man to hire a watchman. The poor oysterman should be encouraged by law to co-operate with other planters in paying a watchman, or, better than that, the State should furnish a police system to protect the planter. I have six watchmen, three of whom are on duty all the time. They stay in little houses built on piles a long distance out from shore. One day one of my watchmen in an out-of-way place got sick and went home. He contracted pneumonia, and it was two weeks before he got word to me. In that time between 4,000 and 5,000 bushels of oysters were taken off the bottom by the small oystermen.
"There ought to be a law preventing oyster shells being used to make roads or burn lime. I expect to plant 20,000 bushels of shells this year. I am in the shucking business also, and consequently have plenty of shells. I expect to make a specialty of selling young oysters to other planters, and hope next season to supply 100,000 bushels. While I am in the business to make money, I think by selling some of the young oysters I will be saved a lot of trouble and will also have room for the others to grow.
Effect of Pure-Food Law.
"The Pure Food law will hurt the oyster business if it is allowed to prevent the shipping of shucked oysters. Dr. Wiley, the Washington food expert, was credited in the newspapers with saying that shucked oysters are not as wholesome as those shipped in the shell. As a matter of fact, no perishable food product is exempt from contamination and unsafe conditions. The oyster in the shell is open to all the dangers that lurk around the shucked product, but it is ordinary experience that shucked oysters reach the consumer in better, safer and more palatable condition than fish and in quite as good condition as any other perishable food product.
"There is no other sea food that reaches the mass of people who live at a distance from the sea in such quantity and at such reasonable price as the shucked oyster. Placing it in fresh water and ice simply protects and preserves it in a wholesome condition for the largest possible period of time. Take the water away and the oyster will rapidly decay. In some mysterious way it swells up with the water, whether applied in the shell or out of it. But it is not reasonable to say that the presence of a little more or less water in an organism that is very largely composed of water can have any deleterious effect upon it as a food. The criticisms based on that are purely academic, and have no support in practical results. It has not been shown that the only function of water in a digestive system is to act as a beverage; and what does it matter how long an oyster lives after it is shucked. A shucked oyster is dead as soon as it is killed, and it stays dead until somebody eats it, and when it becomes too dead to eat, it announces the fact in no equivocal way. But the oyster does not die when opened. He lives a good while thereafter, probably more than a day. But he continues in a palatable and healthy food condition for a long while, just as does the chicken; and when he becomes too dead to eat, he makes no effort to disguise the fact. Thackeray's best girl eat 12 bad oysters. But there is no record of her illness or discomfort. They were simply too bad for him, but not too bad for her.
"Greatest Of The Sea Foods."
"The oyster is easily the greatest of the sea foods. By judicious cultivation they can be reproduced in astonishing quantities and at a price within reach of everybody. But the greatest difficulty in the way of cultivation is that the law is unable to protect the planter in his property. Local public sentiment runs against private ownership. The owner must himself furnish the protection. He must keep a continuous watch, day and night, year in and out, and that means great expense, which a poor man cannot afford. He cannot sit in his watch house and earn bread for his family at the same time. So the Maryland law, which has been designed for the poor man, should be braced up by protecting him in his property by the strong arm of the law, and a campaign of education inaugurated that will convince a whole lot of people that oysters and watermelons are in the same class.
"On the ocean side of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, oysters are cultivated on the 'tideway' the ground lying between high and low water marks. Here they are entirely exposed at nearly every low tide. They grow with great rapidity, but do not get as fat as they do in the fresher water of the Chesapeake Bay. The quantity of oysters that can be produced by cultivation and placed upon the market will only be limited by the quantity of labor. The business will rapidly develop plenty of work for every man that can work on the water and for the women and children in the shucking houses on shore. That work will be of such a nature that people will have continuous work of some kind or other all the year around. The value of the product is so very great that the inflow of money will contribute more toward the prosperity of the favored localities than any other industry that I know of.
"Probably nine-tenths of all the oysters shucked go to the interior and Western portions of the country. If they were not shucked that great mass of people would be debarred from their use by the prohibitive cost of transportation of the shells. Only the rich could enjoy them. Probably no food product affords so much pleasure to such an enormous number of people as the shucked oyster, and they will always be glad to contribute to a river of gold flowing to the favored localities that produce oysters."