Chesapeake Bay Region: The Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century Maryland and Virginia passed laws barring nonresident harvesting and fishing in the bay, as northern harbors became polluted and local oyster beds were exhausted. Many New Englanders moved to the Chesapeake region to take advantage of the abundance of oysters. The New Yorker Thomas H. Kensett II established an oyster packinghouse in Baltimore in 1834 and was the first to use hermetically sealed tin “canisters” (giving us our word “can”) for shucked oysters, fruits, and vegetables. The canning industry in Baltimore grew rapidly, and the number of oysters shipped west more than quadrupled, to over 3 million pounds, between 1848 and 1860.