Okay, in certain areas of the country you can still domestic oysters being exported. The Pacific Northwest still has a good deal of them. The waters of the Long Island Sound are doing what they can to produce some for market and then you have the comparatively miserable few still coming out of the Chesapeake Bay--a name which literally translates to "Great Shellfish Bay" in Algonquian (the once dominant Native American tribe of the Mid-Atlantic States.
When oysters were as plentiful in the Chesapeake as say six and twelve-pack beer rings in the Anacostia (the lesser-known DC river), they controlled the local economy as much as say, technology companies and the Federal Government do today. At a time when I wanted to know more about my ancestry, I thought and read about this period in this region's history. More intimately, I thought about my ancestors who undoubtedly had a much closer relationship to the land and waters than we do today. Among being farmers and craftsmen, they fished and shucked and sold oysters. This painting was an homage to them and the hard, tedious work they did for survival and as tradition.
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