This made perfect sense to Jim, who by day was a dirt farmer. Creating private leases, they reasoned, would allow the public grounds to remain open while encouraging private enterprise to think more radically: like farmers rather than hunter-gatherers. The state of Virginia, knowing that it couldn’t sustain such enormous harvest tallies (nearly half of the world’s consumption was being extracted) but lacking the political will to contain it, set out to increase supply rather than impose caps. What commenced was nothing short of a ‘gold rush’ (and all the imaginable trappings: infighting, greed, theft, bribery). Following the Civil War, Bay oysters had become the target of great interest to a war-torn region looking for a new economy – or just quick cash. This marked a radical shift in the thinking of the time. He was taking advantage of a newly minted state law that allowed Virginians the right to lease ‘private’ grounds in the Chesapeake for the purpose of growing oysters. In the fall of 1899, 24-year-old James Croxton strode into the Essex County, VA, court house to lay claim to 2 acres of Rappahannock River bottom near the south-shore hamlet of South Hill. ![]() ![]() But ultimately, they would become the first generation to face the dire impact of overfishing. And yet, historically speaking, these oystermen were progressive in many ways – the first generation to develop “private” leases (meant to encourage re-investment in the resource), the first to analyze spawning trends, the first to … plan. These oystermen were, after all, decedents of a hunter-gatherer culture – naive to (or unconcerned with) the need for limits or the true costs of their harvest methods. For nearly 100 years, from the 1890s to the 1990s, Bay oystermen operated with a comparatively short-sighted view of their precious resource – and in all fairness, so did our company.
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