The Urbanna Oyster Festival is arguably the largest event of the year on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, drawing up to 50,000 people to the small town. This year’s festival will feature a special tribute to a champion shucker who changed the game for women in competitive shucking.
The spring of 1958, a group of Urbanna businessmen and one businesswoman, Liz Newbill of Liz’s Dress Shop, met in the office of J. W. Hurley & Son Oyster shucking house to discuss ways of stimulating the town’s economy in the fall, after summer folks had gone home for winter.
Other Tidewater towns were introducing town days—Kilmarnock Day and Tappahannock Day—with planned events and festivities. The newly formed Urbanna Business Association decided to hold Urbanna Day each October. In 1961 the name was changed to the Urbanna Oyster Festival.
On Nov. 7-8, the Urbanna Oyster Festival Foundation will hold the 68th annual festival where thousands are expected to visit the town to eat oysters, oysters, and more oysters. Over the years, the festival has evolved into one of the largest seafood festivals in the Chesapeake Bay region and in 1982, to further highlight the area’s oyster culture, the first Virginia Oyster Shucking Contest was held at the festival.
From the start, winners in the professional category were shuckers from local shucking houses. For generations African American males dominated the shucking houses as shuckers. This changed in 1940s and ’50s when large numbers of Black women went from picking vegetables and melons during the growing seasons to crab picking and shucking oysters in local seafood houses.
And boy, they could “solid” shuck oysters! This was most evident when the women were placed centerstage with the men on the competitive shucking tables at the Virginia festival.
The first year of the contest Pamela Page and George “Pee- Wee” Hodges were the female and male professional shucker winners. Hodges was legendary as one of fastest shuckers in the region. When Hodges and Page squared off in the finals of the competition, Page won and was named the first Virginia State Oyster shucking champion. She later won the female national championship at the U. S. Oyster Festival in St. Mary’s County, Maryland.
This set the stage for a series of women winners. This year the Urbanna Oyster Festival Foundation has named Sarah Hammond Stokes, 86, as “Captain of the Urbanna Oyster Festival” to honor her as a trailblazer in competitive oyster shucking.
Stokes was Virginia’s first international star when in 1984 she finished third at the International Oyster Shucking Contest in Galway with nine countries represented in the event.
During the contest, each shucker is allowed to select 24 oysters for each heat. The object is to shuck them as fast as possible and arrange them on the half-shell as attractively and with as little damage to each individual oyster as possible.
She surprised a field of women oyster shuckers in 1983 at the Virginia Oyster Shuckers contest winning the female championship and earning a trip to St. Mary’s County, Md. to compete in the U. S. Oyster Shucking contest.
She again surprised everyone at the 1984 national championships, by winning the women’s championship and then captured the overall (men/women) competition, both times with the slowest times but with the cleanest shucks.
Stokes had the magic touch with her arrangements and had the most clean/undamaged shucked oysters of all. With her win at the national contest, she won an all expense paid trip to Galway, Ireland to compete in the International Oyster Shucking Contest. “It was one of the greatest experiences of by life,” said Stokes, who lives in Urbanna but is currently in the Saluda Nursing and Rehabilitation Center recovering from an illness. “I was so proud when the three finishers in Galway got to stand on the stage holding the flag of their country. They gave me an American flag to hold. It was one of my proudest moments.”
Stokes grew up in the Revis area of Middlesex County, four miles outside of Urbanna with her parents Grant and Lou Bagby. Grant was an oysterman and, her mother, Lou worked the fields as a field hand during picking seasons. Sarah’s first job was as a field hand was piece-meal picking tomatoes for local farmers. She picked vegetables in the spring and later got a job working in a Remlik crab picking house during the summer.
Around 1960, her friend Georgia Foster ask her if she would fill in for her at Ferguson’s Seafood oyster shucking house. Foster needed a day off. Stokes went to work that day and before the day was over, foreman Jasper Bray told her he had a box (shucking stall) for her anytime she wanted it. “I think working in the shucking house was some of the happiest days of my life,” she said. “There were about 40, mostly women, shuckers at Ferguson’s then and we all got along good. We would work real hard and to make the time go by we would sing. There were several in the house whose voices were wonderful and we would all sing together hymns we learned in church—ones we all knew.”
The Remlik shucking house at the time was one of the largest in Virginia. “I was never the fastest shucker but I always shucked a real clean oyster. I had very few cuts on the meat,” she said.
The fastest oyster shucker Stokes said she ever saw was Hodges. “The first day I went to the shucking house Pee-Wee came over and gave me some tips. I’ve never seen anyone shuck an oyster faster than Pee-Wee but I think mine were always cleaner.”
Oyster shuckers are paid piece-meal by the number of gallons of oysters shucked in a day. Stokes recalls the day she made a hundred dollars in one day. “That was really something,” she said.
Later, Deborah Pratt and her sister Clementine Macon Boyd, would become “superstars” in the oyster shucking world who went on to receive national and international recognition for their talents. Pratt received international honors with a second place finish in 1997 and a third place finish in 1994 at the world championships in Galway Ireland. The Virginia State Legislature passed a resolution in 2023 honoring Pratt for her “life-time of shucking oysters and representing the Virginia seafood industry as a world-class oyster shucker.”
Although somewhat forgotten, Stokes deserves her own place in the shucking history books. She won the Virginia female title at the Urbanna Oyster festival in 1984, 1986, 1987 and 1988, often beating Pratt and Boyd when they were newcomers then to the oyster shucking stage.
Stokes seldom won with speed but was meticulous in producing clean, beautifully shucked oysters on her plate.
The 2025 Urbanna Oyster Festival runs Nov. 7-8, all day Friday and Saturday. The Virginia Oyster Shucking Competition happens on Satuday at 11 a.m., but visitors can also look forward to a carnival, beer and wine tastings, live music, arts and crafts, a firemen’s parade, and the town’s unique Queen and Little Miss Spat pageant crowning. Stokes will appear in the fireman’s parade on Friday night and on Saturday in the main Oyster Festival parade. Learn more about the festival here.
