The Waterman's Widow: A True Story

By Carol McCabe Booker

Who killed Captain Littleton Condiff? The wife who slept by his side? A robber seeking the small fortune under his mattress? A son desperate to escape the drudgery of his father's life as an oysterman? His apparently harmless mother-in-law? Perhaps a conspiracy of his wife, her mother, their son? Into this t

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Bay Books LLC
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798985347791

Carol McCabe Booker

Carol McCabe Booker, Simeon Booker's wife of forty-four years, is an attorney and former journalist.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The sudden gunshot was heard up to a mile away. But to many of the sleeping islanders, it sounded like anything but that. The next morning some said they had just rolled over, dismissing the momentary breach of the midnight peace as either the figment of a dream or a mate’s snores. Some of those who recognized it as a gunshot despite the haze of sleep questioned its meaning since it was mid-September and the bird hunting season, highly popular on the Chesapeake Bay and neighboring marshes, was still weeks away. But only the few in close proximity leaped from their beds, anxiously dressing to investigate. Because after that brief pop, they had also heard the short, shrill, female cry. Was there a madman on the island? A feud being settled? Either was so unlikely on Solomon’s Island, a tranquil, waterman’s community. By daybreak they would learn the source of the shot.

But would they ever know who fired it?

1

AN OMINOUS FORECAST

A man’s gotta love it to do it.

—A Chesapeake Waterman

It was the last week of summer 1900, the start of the oyster season on the Chesapeake Bay. From its headwaters north of Baltimore to points some 200 miles south, almost a quarter of a million Marylanders made their living plowing those waters. For many of them, including some 600 or so souls on southern Maryland’s Solomon’s Island, the oyster industry was their chief means of support. Now, at the opening of the 1900–1901 season, the outlook was never more dismal. The Bay’s once abundant oyster beds were disappearing, and unless steps were taken to prevent it, near-total depletion was a reasonable possibility. The total yield in the past year was under a million bushels, as compared with almost two million bushels a decade earlier in the 1890–91 season. Weighing this more than 50 percent decrease, experts at the U.S. Fish Commission (a forerunner of the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service) concluded that at this rate, in twenty years the industry will have acquired absolute insignificance.

Supporting that dim prediction, the September opening of the new season was disappointing. A local newspaper in Calvert, the southern Maryland county with a long shoreline along the Bay, summed it up in two sentences:

Warm weather is preventing any activity in the oyster business, which opened the season last Saturday. The demand is light and the market has not assumed any definite shape.

On Solomon’s Island, Dr. William H. Marsh, the community’s first doctor, was also a volunteer weather observer. He reported from his home at the island’s tip, overlooking the confluence of the Patuxent River and the Bay, that September temperatures had reached an uncomfortable high of 97 degrees on September 5. Warm temperatures can hinder growth and prompt fewer oysters to spawn. There were also thunderstorms on September 14, 16, 26 and 27, and total rainfall for the month was 3.05 inches. None of this was good for oystering. To watermen, these conditions signaled a continuing period of decline in the bounty of the Chesapeake.

The Fish Commission described the Bay as one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth, the fertility of its bottom being comparable only to that of the valleys of the Nile and Ganges. But the Bay was adapted for one crop only: oysters. The Chesapeake alone yielded twice as many oysters as all foreign countries put together. Given time, and with substantial investment, the Commission predicted that the slow death of the industry could be turned around. Toward that end, in April 1900, the Maryland legislature enacted a law banning oystering on three creeks around Solomon’s Island—Mill, St. Johns and Back Creeks—for three years, due to the depleted condition of beds formerly rich in oysters. The experts estimated that with proper cultivation, the oyster-growing areas in the Chesapeake would be worth $100 an acre yearly (the equivalent of more than $3500 in 2023 dollars). But the depletion of the oyster beds had already affected the livelihoods of local watermen around Solomon’s Island and nearby waters, and many were in debt.

The Tongers

The oysterman’s work was back-breaking, hands-on labor. The tools used to pull the shellfish from the floor of the Bay were the oyster tongs. Picture two sticks, up to 30 feet in length, and crossed at a pivot point like scissors about a quarter of the way from one end. The heads of the tongs resemble rakes: a set of claws and bars spaced to allow small shells and debris to fall out, but not the oysters.

The waterman kept his boat loosely anchored so that each time he lowered the tongs, the rake scraped a different spot on the bed. The scissor movement of the tongs broke the oysters loose from the bed and raked them into a pile. He then grasped the pile with the coupled rakes and brought the loaded tongs up, dumping the oysters on a culling table to be sorted by size.

This was the preferred method of oystering, although some watermen insisted instead on dredging the beds. They pulled a submerged basket behind the boat for a half mile or so, unavoidably damaging the beds while harvesting the oysters. The dredgers persisted in this method even after both Maryland and Virginia banned it, while the tongers viewed them with unbridled disdain.

Whatever the method of harvesting, the peaceful quest for oysters turned into a war. From 1865 until the mid–1900s, licensed watermen and pirates feuded up and down the Chesapeake Bay and on both the Potomac and Patuxent rivers. In 1830, Maryland banned nonresidents from harvesting oysters in its waters, then prohibited dredging, and ultimately required annual permits for oystering.

After the Civil War, the demand for oysters soared wildly, bringing fishermen from as far away as New England down the coast and up into the Bay and its tributaries. There, they clashed with Marylanders and Virginians, who were already battling each other on the beds. The St. Mary’s Beacon reported in the spring of 1877 that quite a number of Eastern ‘Yankee’ schooners had been in the Patuxent River in the past ten days for oysters to plant in their Northern and Eastern waters, but not one had been allowed to carry a single bushel from the river. The article credited the Oyster Police, a force created by Maryland in 1868, with preventing the poaching.

Violence between tongers and dredgers, as well as the depletion of the oysters, led Virginia to ban dredging in 1879. Still, pirates from both states plundered each other’s coastal oyster beds, some continuing to use the illegal method. Many of the watermen carried concealed weapons.

By the 1900 season, many of the local oystermen had given up altogether. Between the 1896 and 1901 oyster seasons, the number of tongers licenses issued in Calvert County declined almost 34 percent (from 897 to 594). Some of those who persisted were turning to the upper Bay, where the oysters seemed more plentiful, while others still plugged away on the shallow bars lining the creeks and inlets around the island where harvesting was still permitted. Only those with incomes from other than—or in addition to—oystering had any money to invest in the purchase of oyster beds, as the Commission recommended.

Even in the best of times, when he enjoyed a good harvest and wasn’t confronting poachers, an oysterman’s life was not always smooth sailing. He went out on the water on the coldest winter days, when the wind turned his face a raw red and the water froze his fingers as he worked the tongs. It was often said that a man had to love it to do it. Yet one never heard anyone say he loved it. The oyster tonger had no reason to expect a long life, but these days, he would be a fool to expect an easy one. The oysters were disappearing, and along with them, his livelihood.

This was the context of the mysterious shooting in the minutes after midnight in a small, rundown home on Solomon’s Island Road on September 13, 1900.

2

MYSTERIOUS SHOOTING AT SOLOMON’S ISLAND

SECRET MURDER AND ROBBERY

The victim fatally shot while in his bed beside his sleeping wife and child

The Baltimore Sun reported the incident in a single sentence on the front page: Capt. Littleton T. Condiff was mysteriously shot in the head and fatally wounded while in bed in his house in Calvert County. Further details would follow the next day in a Special Dispatch to the Sun under the headline Died Of His Wound, over a tower of subheads referring to a secret murder and robbery and stating that the victim had been sleeping beside his wife and child. The newspaper reported that Capt. Condiff had been shot Wednesday night, and that he had died of the wound at 2:30 in the afternoon on Friday:

The bullet passed into his brain through the right eye, producing