Monuments dedicated to the waterman tradition were all the rage in Chesapeake Bay communities during the 1990s. In places like Rock Hall, Grasonville, and Solomons Island, locals raised money to commemorate men who worked, and sometimes died, on the water. It was a time when Maryland’s blue crab fishery, like the oyster fishery before it, had suffered precipitous declines. The ubiquity of those monuments in travel brochures and tourist itineraries—even to this day—shows how fully people invested in public memory as a hedge against Maryland’s fickle maritime economy.
It was not the first time, though, that Marylanders turned to heritage tourism to fight back against declining Bay fisheries. Beginning in the 1930s, prompted by a global economic recession and slumping seafood harvests, tourist boards pitched the Eastern Shore’s historical charms relentlessly to auto tourists and real estate investors. The Baltimore Sun instructed travelers on how to see “The Sho’ Through a Windshield.” Real estate agents hawked old plantation homes to wealthy investors from New York City. And A. Aubrey Bodine’s distinctive photojournalism reimagined working watermen not as industrial laborers, but as picturesque guardians of a bygone era, men who were “in our time, but not of it (Franky Henry, Baltimore Sun, March 28, 1954).”
By the time the Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened in 1952, these rustic enticements were luring wealthy people east to the Eastern Shore, a weekend getaway for the well-heeled. It was in this era that one Maryland organization dreamed up a monument that would commemorate the rustic watermen tradition on a much larger scale.
The Maryland Conservation Federation floated the proposal in 1951 to erect a 50-foot-tall monument at the eastbound entrance to the soon-to-be-completed Bay Bridge. A plaster mockup of the monument garnered considerable attention at the Federation’s Flower and Garden show held that year in Baltimore’s Fifth Regiment Armory Building. It depicted an aged watermen sitting with his grandson, gesturing wistfully toward the Chesapeake Bay. Behind them rose up a massive oyster shell inscribed with the words: “As ye sow ye shall reap”.
Unlike the tourism campaigns that romanticized Maryland’s historic fisheries, the massive waterman monument was meant to inspire a sustainable oyster fishery, an idea ahead of its time.
The Federation intended it to remind passersby that the environmental damage done by unfettered oyster harvesting was a choice and that they could, in fact, choose otherwise. Federation president H. Lee Hoffman explained that “the purpose of the new monument will be to remind Marylanders [that the Bay] still has great resources potential for the commercial fisherman and recreational use as well.” An opinion writer for the Sun put it in sharper terms: “The bay oyster beds have been dredged to extinction… can any loyal Marylander callously neglect the memory of its most succulent aborigine?”
It was another jab in what, by then, had been a decades-long fight over what to do about declines in Maryland oyster harvests. States including Rhode Island and Connecticut had already turned to the artificial cultivation techniques advocated for by conservationists striving to rebuild depleted oyster beds.
In Maryland at the time, tidewater communities enjoyed enormous power in the state legislature. In Annapolis, watermen leveraged all of their political capital to defy the conservationists. What could science tell them about oysters that they didn’t already know? And why listen to conservationists who, the oystermen believed, were just corporate hacks looking to privatize the Bay?
In the end, it wasn’t politics that defeated the Conservation Federation’s plan to pitch oyster conservation directly to bridge commuters with a giant statue. The bigger problem was that, well, the monument was just plain ugly. Hans Schuler, longtime director of the Maryland Institute College of Art, designed it himself, going so far as to interview “a number of watermen before completing his search for one who would be typical of the trade and… suitable to pose for the [statue].”
Despite Schuler’s efforts, many visitors to the 1951 Flower and Garden Show where the mockup was displayed did not find it suitable, according to comments made to the Baltimore Sun. Lee Lawrie of Easton remarked that there “should be a better monument” to go along with the Federation’s plan. Mrs. Gay of Baltimore thought, “The oyster shell is terrible.” E.J. Marshall of Westminster agreed: “The statue is hideous.”
Needless to say, the monument campaign never quite hit its mark. Erstwhile Federation president Hoffman was still making the case five years later, hopeful that another organization might adopt the mockup so that he would no longer have to keep it in storage. In a letter to the Maryland Board of Natural Resources, Hoffman predicated that the monument would draw visitors in “large numbers” just as Massachusetts’s 1925 Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial had. But if a taker could not be found, Hoffman continued, then the outsized shell should be thrown in the Bay “where oysters will soon find it an excellent deposit for their spat, thereby helping in a small way to restore oyster production.”
Whatever actually became of Hoffman’s plaster shell is unclear. What is clear, though, is that monuments have always been poor conduits for complicated ideas. Selling conservation means making delicate arguments about marine biology, regional economics, and environmental sustainability. It is a conversation too about labor, identity, and cultural heritage. Trying to encompass all these themes ended up being too confusing, so Schuler tried to make it work by putting the oyster first. His was an angry oyster, large and looming, bent on biblical admonition. Is it any wonder that Marylanders balked?
Conversely, the watermen monuments that did eventually get made always put the watermen first. As if plucked straight from a Bodine photospread, they focus squarely on manhood, heroism, and the virtues of working hard on the water. But here too are problems. You’d never know from the watermen monuments we have today that there ever was—or still is—an argument about oyster conservation at all. Marylanders who work on the water have always been more diverse and not quite so rustic as the statues (like Rock Hall’s “Old Salt”) would have us believe.
In the end, what we learn by retracing the campaign for Maryland’s forgotten 1951 watermen’s monument is that monuments never were going to fix the seafood industry’s economic problems. Doing that means finding ways to have the hard conversations about history, power, and the environment— for which monuments are always a poor substitute.
—Dr. Seth C. Bruggeman is a professor of history at Temple University, and the 2024/25 Ashby M. Larmore Research Fellow at the Maryland Center for History and Culture.
