ST. MICHAELS, MD — With the recent acquisition of nearly 900 rare and antique oyster cans, advertising signs and other seafood marketing objects, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum's collection of tidewater seafood industry artifacts is the largest and most valuable of its kind.
"This remarkable collection has an extraordinary number of rare and one-of-a-kind pieces and the condition of the items is excellent," said Museum Curator Pete Lesher.
The museum acquired the artifacts from Ronnie Newcomb, an Eastern Shore collector who began accumulating the pieces in the 1970s. Of the hundreds of items, nearly 600 are metal containers ranging in capacity from eight ounces to five gallons. Seafood packers on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay filled the containers with raw oysters, abundant in the bay until disease, pollution and overharvesting nearly shut down the industry, and shipped the popular bivalve around the world.
The cans include hand-soldered containers dating to the late nineteenth century and several examples of the "Elvis tin," so named by collectors because the waterman featured on the label resembles the late rock 'n' roll icon. Because there were so many oyster-packing houses on the shores of the Chesapeake, dealers often tried to make their cans stand out from the competition by designing brightly-colored labels.
Half the oyster tins in the collection were made prior to World War II, according to Lesher, and most came from the commercial seafood packing centers of Baltimore, Crisfield and Cambridge in Maryland and Norfolk and Chincoteague in Virginia.
In addition to the tins, the museum also acquired numerous wooden shipping crates, advertising signs and clocks, tokens, playing cards, paperweights, can openers, post cards, sheet music and licenses, all linked to the oyster trade.
Newcomb said his fascination with oyster tins grew from his interest in hunting decoys and other Eastern Shore memorabilia. "Through my decoy collecting and travels, I started noticing the oyster tins with their really nice colorful labels," he said. "It was funny to me, all these same oysters were going into so many different cans with different labels."
Newcomb, a field supervisor for a power company, said the popularity of oyster cans spread in the 1980s among other collectors and antiques dealers. Competition for the rarest cans was keen and prices skyrocketed. "By 1990," he said, "it was really getting tough." Newcomb said the most he ever paid for a single can was "several thousand dollars."
Although the museum has no immediate plans to display the entire collection publicly, Lesher said pieces of it may be added to existing exhibitions, including the "Oystering on the Chesapeake" building that houses an authentic skipjack oyster boat.
"The importance of this collection to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is hard to overstate," said Lesher. "The collection's value goes beyond exhibitions. This collection will be invaluable to historians looking for clues to the existence, location, products and dates of operations of early business enterprises."
Link: Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Posted: 11-22-2002
