Ellsworth Linton never forgot “the hardest day’s work I ever did in my life.” It came in the midst of the Great Depression, 1937.
The buyboat J.C. Drewer pulled into Saxis Island one morning with 2,180 bushels of oysters that had been harvested from across the Chesapeake Bay in the James River. He and just one other worker spent that entire day shoveling oysters into a tub, which would then swing ashore to be emptied and swing back to filled, over and over and over again.
The task took the two men more than 10 hours. He was paid 30 cents an hour.
“I went up to [the boss’s] house that night and got my money”–yup, $3.30.
Linton had a hole in his shoe and used the money to buy a new pair of shoes from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. “You put your foot on the catalog and measured it to find the size,” he noted.
After ordering the shoes, “I had about 10 cents left.”
Bottom line: “It was tight times then.”
I came across this anecdote in the book Almost an Island: The History of Saxis, Virginia, by the late Rev. Kirk Mariner. The photo up top here is from the book, too, though from a different day in Saxis. It shows a gentleman named Stewart Ewell moving mountains of oyster shells at the dock in Saxis. The shells would eventually be planted back out on oyster beds in Tangier Sound.
–posted by Jim Duffy for Secrets of the Eastern Shore/Whimbrel Creations LLC in April 2025. Thank you for spending some time on this site!
