Oysters

Copyrighted 1934 by The Union News Company, N.Y.

Here, “way out west” as our down-east fathers thought, by express (“re-iced” as it said on the box) they came, those FirePlace oysters—big of shell, fat to fullness, firm yet tender, just waiting to be opened! And with the Long Island oyster-knife that we keep handy, opened they were and devoured!

“A well know edible bivalve mollusk” (oysters virginca) found along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast of North America,” says the dictionary. Another kind is found on the Pacific Coast and a gold digger (of the forty-niner kind) who went to the golden state wrote that they were “scarce and small.” John Smith who skirted our coast in 1612 found “creuises (whatever they are), oysters, cockles, and mussels.” The Plymouth laws in 1661 inacted “five shillings shall bee payed to the cuntrey for euery barrel of oysters that is karried out of the government.” (Five shillings translated into our value might mean as much as $10.00.)

The oyster appears in many metaphorical expressions, for example, Knickerbocker’s History has “Every place was shut as tight as an oyster.” Persons have been known to enjoy themselves “like and oyster in the mud.” “Dumb as an oyster” appears in our literature and Carl Sandburg quotes a sunburned Westerner as saying, “You ain’t got the sense God gave an oyster.”

And it’s an old time business. Ben Franklin in 1726 has “oyster merchants fetch them from other places.” Narragansett had a governor in 1777 who was an “oyster-pickler.” “Oyster-venders,” “oyster-planters,” “oyster-traders,” “oyster-men,” “oyster-openers,” “oyster-gatherers,” “oyster-pirates,” and “oyster-merchants,” have appeared all up and down the East Coast all through the years.

In 1761, Conner in his diary says, “We anchored at Southold harbor by oyster ponds on Long Island,” and the Huntington town records (1857) this—“over and across the cove to the old oyster pond dam.”

Recipes for oyster pies, oyster patties, oyster soup, oyster stew, oyster currie, oyster gumbo, and oyster loaves appear in newspapers and cookbooks all across the last hundred years.

There was an oyster war in 1654 between the New Yorkers and the Jerseyites. (That latter were called clam diggers.) The New York Tribune of December 20^th, 1861, records the re-opening of the oyster trade and related the difficulties of the oyster business occasioned by the War between the States. Oyster fisheries, oyster packing-houses, oyster canneries, oyster traffic, oyster laws, and oyster commissions are mentioned.

A whole fleet of oyster gathering boats appear, not only a plain “oyster boat” and the ungainly “oyster scow,” but “oyster schooners,” “oyster pinkies,” “oyster pungies,” and even an “oyster canoe” was used for tonging in Chesapeake Bay.

In Harper’s Magazine of 1882, we read that “the ship was both a fruiter and an oyster boat prosecuting these callings at different seasons,” so that the Century Dictionary definition of an oyster-boat as “a shucking house constructed on a raft” would not appear to be entirely correct.

General Putnam in the Revolution had authority to commission oyster boats for privateering and in the War of 1812 some were so employed.

“Oyster clubs,” “oyster suppers,” “oyster parties,” “oyster banquets,” as well as “oyster roasts,” are recorded.

Nichols in his account of “American Life” (1664) says that “gentlemen living upon the rivers, ponds, and inlets in the vicinity of New York have their oyster plantations as regularly as their gardens.” Scribner’s Monthly (1870) speaks of “oyster farms” and another writer in 1888 speaks of an “oyster field supplying a bounteous repast.” The “oysterman” appears in New York in 1755 and “he could clear eight to ten shillings a day.”

Oysters are sold in “cellars,” “houses,” “depots,” at “stands,” and in “shops.” In 1875, the Chicago Tribune on the fifth day of September records that “Wilson’s is decidedly the most handy and convenient oyster-parlor in the city.” George Ade in his fables frequents an “oyster bay.” The hang-out of a certain thief was an “oyster shanty,” and the “oyster bar” is still with us. “Oyster cellars” did not at first include gentlemen among their visitors” (Watson’s Philosophy 1830).

Oyster lime, obtained from the shells, is an ingredient of many plastered walls in colonial and later houses. “Wonder Working Providence” (1654) speaks of, “the country that affords no lime but what is burned of oyster shells.” In 1853, Fowler, in his “Home For All,” advises that “those persons who would economize have only to order those very shells which the oysterman has to pay to have carted away, carried to your building spot.” As early as 1853, an Almanac discloses that “all land on which clover is grown must either have lime naturally or that mineral must be artificially supplied in the form of stone-lime, oyster-lime, or mar.”

To “Oyster” is used as an intransitive verb and the Brookhaven town records in 1767 record that “The Trustees shall . . . [missing page 4]

. . . seaboards from Maine to Florida. Morton (1667) explains that many of these are twelve or fifteen feet high. Hawkins (1787), “At the lower part of the bluff is a bed of oyster shells.” Paulding (1817) writes from the South, “There are large masses of oyster shells along the banks.” New Haven (1642), “The common fields called the oyster shell fields.” Providence (1723), “eight acres upon oyster shell plains.” New York (1885), “Oyster shell bank.”

So with Weld (1799) in his “Travels” we record that on the day that the FirePlace Oysters came from Ellsworth in Greenport, that “oyster meat formed the whole of our dinner.” Someone in 1902, in a New York paper speaks of “the twenty-five cent democratic oyster stew” so we must add that ours cost more than that by a considerable amount—but was entirely worth it.

We enjoyed the oysters and the reminiscences of home; how our boys one summer went to the FirePlace Camp and how in the patriarchal days of Lyon Gardiner and his succeeding proprietors, the signal fires to call the Gardner’s Island boat were kindled at the “fire place” from whence our oysters came out of deep water, sea salted, and fresh (all at the same time), and “fat as butter” as the saying goes; “like a piece of pork” in texture and everything else that a Gardiner’s Bay oyster ought to have and be.

And because Bronson Alcott said that one ought to live above the table we have with the generous help of the Dictionary of the American Language, put together this tribute to this succulent bivalve.

“If I am not here when you awake

Just hunt me up with an oyster-rake.”

(Billings “HardTack” 1866) 

--Jesse Halsey

Rural Parish A.D. 1800

For McCormick Speaking | c1948

By Jesse Halsey

East Hampton lies well toward the east end of that sand-spit known as Long Island, which like a sperm whale has its head anchored toward Manhattan and throws its double-pronged flukes a hundred and thirty miles out into the Atlantic. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, made a journey down the Island in 1800 and leaves a report of his impressions in his journal. One of the objectives of his long trek by horse-back and coach along the sandy trails through the scrub oaks, and dunes, and beside the water roads, was a visit to his former pupil Lyman Beecher, then the minister at East Hampton. A deep mutual affection existed between the young parson and his old professor. Beecher was thoroughly grounded in Dwight’s type of theology—liberal for its time.

The East Hampton Church, like several of its neighbors, was founded in the 1640s. They were called individually, The Church of Christ in East Hampton, Southampton, Southold, and so on. Congregational of necessity at first, by 1800 they were Presbyterian, at least in name, and Long Island Presbytery was one of the constituents of the first Synod (1717). These churches were closely allied geographically, ethnographically, culturally, financially, and every otherwise with New England; most of their ministers came from Yale college.

East Hampton Parish consisted of 300 souls scattered in several hamlets and centering in “the village” which sprawled around the Church. This stood near it on the east side of the Town Pond, the cemetery, and the Common. Across the street stood the Clinton Academy, the first of its kind in New York state. The steeple of the church, the cupola of the academy, and three towering Dutch windmills dominated the skyline. Scraggly elm trees, long since become stately, bordered the wide village street; sandy in the summer, a quagmire of mud in the springtime.

The manse, a gray-shingled salt-box house stood hard by the church. Its wide-planked floors like all other in the town were powdered with clean white sand from the ocean beach. The minister’s bride had received a gift in money from an uncle with which Beecher bought a bale of cotton. This, spun and woven into fabric, Mrs. Beecher determined to make into a carpet. She tacked it to the attic floor and on it painted a bright floral design of roses. This in due season was fitted to the living room floor. Soon after Deacon Talmadge made a call. As the deacon hesitated to enter the preacher said, “Come in, deacon, it is made to walk on.” The old deacon threw up his hands and exclaimed, “All this, and heaven too?”

“Wide was the parish, with houses far asunder,” as Chaucer says of his parson, but like his prototype Beecher, on horse-back and on foot, covered the territory between the village and the Springs, on Montauk 15 miles away where dwelt the remnants of an Indian tribe. With the fervency of youth and the zeal of the old time religion, the pastor went his rounds visiting and “holding meetings.” The trip to the Indian settlement entailed a toilsome journey across a trackless waste of sand called Nappeague, the ocean on one side and the bay that opened into Long Island Sound on the other. Here along the route in season there were wild grapes, blackberries, huckleberries, beach plums, and cranberries: with these the preacher kept his growing household well supplied.

Beecher was also an ardent fisherman and no mean hunter. There were several brooks along the trails through his parish and he would often bring home fish for supper, as he always carried tackle in the pockets of his long-tailed coat. On one occasion he hooked some fish, slipped them into the big pocket of his Sabbath coat, and forgot them until he appeared in the pulpit on the next Lord’s Day, when as he extracted his handkerchief, the remnant of the fish were revealed.

The young minister introduced the country-side to horticulture. Like Jonny Appleseed, he started trees, budded them, developed an orchard and taught his parishioners and neighbors to do the same.

The duel in which Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton called forth great indignation throughout the states. Beecher wrote a sermon condemning the practice, and after submitting it to his friend Lyon Gardner (the owner of a large island adjoining the mainland which had been entailed from his ancestors since 1638) preached it in his own pulpit, and again at a meeting of Synod in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and in new York City, where it gained newspaper publicity. This, historians say, was the beginning of the active agitation that led to legislation that outlawed the practice. Moreover, it gave the young country minister a national reputation.

Beecher had been preceded in his pastorate by Dr. Samuel Buell who served nearly sixty years. It was he who converted Sir William Erskine, the British general in command during the occupation of Long Island by the British. The conversion was not from Anglicanism to Presbyterianism, but to the patriot cause so that the general resigned his commission and went back to England. Dr. Buell had promoted several successful revivals and this, both in his day and in Beecher’s, was the criterion of a successful ministry. Moreover, Dr. Buell practiced what was known as “the half-way covenant,” that is, children were universally baptized regardless of whether their parents had communicant church connections or not. Beecher did not believe in this practice and frankly said so. This led to at least minor frictions with his deacons and congregation. Nonetheless, the young minister went from strength  to strength, and for ten years, with a series of revivals and by consistent pastoral ministrations built up his church in membership and influence, and his own influence in the Presbytery, and his reputation throughout the Island and southern New England.

Catherine Beecher, the oldest daughter, was herself a pioneer in education, writing extensively in magazines and books, not only about pedagogical theory but practical methods, including kitchen arrangements—with drawings attached. Years afterword, when most of the family had become farmers, in writing to her brother, Charles, she tells many interesting things about the East Hampton home where she was born. “Strict discipline—‘Mind your mother’; ‘Quick!’; ‘No crying’; ‘Look pleasant!’ These were words of command, obeyed with almost military speed and precision. This strong government was always attended with overflowing sympathy and love.”

The parson’s chief daily recreations were frolics with his children. “I remember him more as a playmate than in any other character during my childhood.” He was fond of playing pranks, for his amusement as well as that of the children. Once he swung Catherine out of the garret window by the hands to see if it would frighten her, which it did not in the least. Another time, as he was running past a washtub he ducked her head into it to see what she would do. “He taught me to catch fish and I was his constant companion, riding in his chaise in my little chair to the villages around where he went to hold meetings,” she writes. “As I grew older I began to share his more elevated trains of thought. By this intellectual companionship our house became in reality a school of the highest kind in which he was all the while exerting a powerful influence upon the mind and character of his children.”

The ocean was nearly a half-mile from the house. The roar could be heard any hour of the day or night and white sails could be seen from the windows. On the occasions of a northeast storm, members of the family often went down to watch from the shelter of the beach banks. There was a cranberry marsh between the village and the beach, and the dunes were covered with beach plums in season.

The children who in summer constantly played on the beach often played tag with the surf—“Sometimes we were overtaken and drenched. “ As they learned to swim they were taught to watch out for the “sea-poose” made by two waves meeting from opposite directions then creating a sort of suction-vacuum in their furious race back to the ocean.

With the other villagers they watched for the “weft” when a whale was sighted off-shore. The first to see it removed his coat and waved it, ran up along the beach-banks shouting, “Whale off!” “Whale off!” “When it came its strange wild notes poured out over the town. It seemed as though I could almost fly so great was my excitement,” wrote one of the children. Once, at least, the preacher went off with a village crew chasing a whale ten miles to sea.

Beecher was fond of hunting the wild birds—ducks and geese—which came in profusion every spring and fall. He once took his two boys, William and Edward, with him to fish for eels and “they brought back nearly a cartload of them.” They gathered beach plums by the bushel and these, with quinces and cranberries, were the common table sweetmeats.

Because of straightened finances, Mrs. Beecher kept a school for young ladies. The boarding pupils lived with the family; two English girls, one from Honduras, and several from Island villages as much as fifty miles away, all lived with the family. Mr. Beecher had learned to play the violin while in college and for the benefit of the girls “every day played the liveliest airs, but if any of the girls began to take a dancing step, he would make the violin give a doleful screech and thus ended every attempt to dance.”

One of the girls, Eleanor Lawless from Honduras (“as wild and untamed as her name”) brought a piano with her, the first ever seen in the village. No wonder that the house was filled with wondering and delighted listeners. The manse overflowed with young people and “father’s constitutional mirthfulness developed itself more freely than ever afterwards.”

During his pastorate Beecher was seriously ill for over a year, unable to preach and journeyed as far as Baldston Spa looking for a cure. His salary was promptly paid, however, and the deacons took responsibility for the conduct of the services. Toward the end of the year, Deacon Fithian refused to pay his tithe. “Why is it,” asked the deacon, “that ministers are so greedy for money? “That,” replied the minister, “is the only way to save the souls of some of their parishioners, they are so greedy themselves that we have to take it from them!”

A series of revivals attended Beecher’s ten year pastorate: “times of refreshing from the Presence of the Lord.” On one occasion one hundred were added to the membership of the church. The Infidel Club that was in the town, headed by a school teacher and a doctor, quietly broke up under the influence of Beecher’s logical preaching and his friendly ways that included the doctor and teacher on fishing and hunting trips.

Methodist evangelicals were “undermining” the (stolid) Presbyterian constituency here and there on the Island. One such itinerant drove into East Hampton. Beecher immediately went to the tavern, took the preacher home with him, entrained him royally, rang the church bell that evening, and loaned him the pulpit. Next morning the Methodist brother was seen leaving town, driving back toward New York, the last visit of a Methodist during Beecher’s time.

Family obligations (four children were born) led Beecher to ask for an increase in salary, which the congregation refused. He then moved to Litchfield, Conn., where Henry Ward and Harriet (Beecher Stowe) were born. The old church building is gone long since, though Beecher’s high pulpit is preserved in the Clinton Academy. The old windmills remain and one of them still grinds grist.

Beecher and his family went on from strength to strength—Litchfield, Boston, Lane—so that at his funeral in 1860 the officiating minister (Rev. Bacon) could say with some truth that the country was made up of “Saints, Sinnerx, and Beechers.”

"He calls himself a social radical"

Col. Wm. Cooper Procter (Aug. 25, 1862 — May 2, 1934) by Jesse Halsey

He is a tall gentleman, this colonel, as a colonel should be. He calls himself a social radical—and is worth millions. He is a forceful executive, yet has helped numbers of his friends weather the Depression, who otherwise would have been swamped.

His business has, in spite of said Depression, had the biggest year in its history and made ten million dollars; not for him, however, but for its stockholders.

An appointment is not hard to make, if you have a real errand. His private office is substantially furnished but not elegantly. He sits behind a mahogany desk and the red wood reflects a little color into his gray angular face. When he moves back from the desk the gray suit he wears makes his face seem white and drawn. Yesterday he went to Florida, where he will turn brown, but without tan that face looks almost ashen. And no wonder. He has been a hospital patient half a dozen times these last years. His breath comes short, if he hurries; sounds like asthma.

He finds it hard to slow down; he has always been a driver—of himself, and others, too.

“I want a man to do a day’s work. There will always be some who won’t work; the unemployable. But every man who wants to work ought to have the chance.”

His own company, for some years now, has lived up to this, guaranteeing to its employees work for at least forty-eight weeks a year.

“When I left college and came home to the factory my father and his partners thought I was crazy when I suggested a half holiday on Saturday. That was my first radicalism and I have been at it ever since.” There is a twinkle in his blue eye as he says this, so that you forget the “cold” of the penetrating gaze and the angularity of the face—somehow it has lost its sharpness.

A business deal he carries through with precision tending to every detail himself. He is, one overhears, not an easy man to work with, yet he has several hundred men you have been with him a lifetime!

He loves wild flowers and the out of doors and has a large, but simple house on the high sand dunes overlooking the ocean and Gardner’s Bay on the east end of Long Island.

“When the collapse came in Germany, the only people who had anything in the end were the land owner’s,” he said to me one day and then told about his farm in central Ohio of four thousand acres.