Star Spangled Stories: How Maryland’s oyster boom brought wealth, violence and greed

By the 1880s, the Chesapeake Bay supplied nearly half of the world's consumed oysters, prompting a boom of wealth, greed and violence in Maryland that lasted nearly a century. Pirates from New England sailed south and Maryland and Virginia watermen poached each other. Annapolis tried to enforce order by creating the Oyster Navy, but the Bay’s oyster population has never recovered from the Oyster Wars.