North Carolina Maritime Museum

On Friday morning, we decided to tour the North Carolina Maritime Museum. We started across the street from the museum. There is a large building where volunteers are building and restoring wooden boats. Inside, there is walkway above the work area, where you can watch the boats being built. Scott was pleasantly surprised to see that the volunteers here use the same brand of epoxies that he does! We just missed seeing them work on a WWII landing craft (like was used to unload troops onto the beach at Normandy). It had been sent here for restoration, and is now in shrink wrap, on a truck bound for Chicago.

We then walked across the street, to the building that houses the museum, and walked through the exhibits. It’s free to go through, and the exhibits tell about history of the area’s pirates, fishing industry, coast guard, and fish and wildlife. The exhibits were extensive, and really interesting. Afterward, we walked behind the building, to the “boat house”, where some old wooden boats are kept. The museum was well worth the time to stop and visit.

Here are a few tidbits I picked up from some of the exhibits:

In colonial North Carolina, fishing was mainly for food, not commercial sale. The full development of commercial fisheries didn’t come until ice was readily available and efficient transportation networks were established (first by rail and later by road), to permit the shipment of fresh fish.

North Carolina is now one of the top ten states in the nation in commercial and recreational catches each year.

Fishing’s annual value to North Carolina’s economy is in the range of 1 billion.

North Carolina is the third largest producer of blue crabs on the east coast.

George Ives pioneered the oyster business when he started shipping them fresh from the Beaufort area in 1874. By 1880, approximately 1,000 oysterman worked the area, bringing in 60,000 bushels yearly.

In 1889, large scale oystering occurred, when oyster dealers from the Chesapeake Bay established canneries on the Pamlico Sound. The bay’s oysters had been already been depleted by the late 1880’s and this caused and invasion of that area’s oystermen to come work the “new” beds of North Carolina. In 1890, approximately schooners from New Jersey, Deleware, Maryland and Virginia were dredging Pamlico Sound for oysters to be shipped to Baltimore and labeled and sold as “Chesapeake” oysters. As a result, North Carolina’s oyster catch rose from 100,000 bushels in 1887 to 2,800,000 bushels in 1890.

To try and get a handle on this, North Carolina passed in 1891 prohibiting oyster dredging by non residents and establishing a winter season. The state’s harvest peaked in 1899, when vessels landed 2,450,000 bushels. Unfortunately, the ravaged beds did not recover, and the oyster catch began to decline.

“..oysters…their numbers inexhaustible, - a man may easily gather more in a day than he can well eat in a year. “

Thomas Ashe – 1682

Here are some pictures and a few more tidbits of info., from the maritime museum.