Historian and author Gary Mormino reflects upon shell middens and Florida foodway

Behold the Sunshine State’s cornucopia: Plant City strawberries, Ruskin tomatoes, Frostproof oranges, Dade City kumquats, Cedar Key clams, Chassahowitzka pompano, and John’s Pass mullet.

But no other local foodstuff has meant so much for so long to so many as Tampa Bay oysters. If, as Jonathan Swift insisted, “He was a bold man who first did eat an oyster,” so, too, is any reader who has sampled a local oyster recently.

Alas, the Tampa Bay oyster appears to have joined Zellwood sweet corn, the scrub jay, and Yellow-Dog Democrats as symbols of a vanishing Florida.

For thousands of years, Native Americans relied upon the oyster as an indispensable food source and building material. From Crystal River to Terra Ceia, from Spanish Point to Pine Island, hundreds of shell mounds and middens stand as testament and sentinel to the Indians’ religious and dietary customs.

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Historian Ray Arsenault writes, “Prior to the founding of St. Petersburg, there were at least seven mounds in the Booker Creek-Big Bayou area of the peninsula. Shell Mound Park was built to preserve the area’s last surviving mound, but it later fell victim to hospital expansion.” Tampa also had an immense mount located at the water’s edge of today’s downtown.

It was a ceremonial mound that soldiers at Fort Brooke built a Japanese pagoda at the crest. That mound also fell victim to modernization, hauled away in carts to be used as street fill in 1876.

When cartographers charted Florida’s waters, they named bodies of water and islands after the mundane mollusk: Oyster Key, Oyster River, and Oyster Bay.

In 1824, Lt. George A. McCall sailed into Tampa Bay, part of a military vanguard that established Fort Brooke on the Hillsborough River. McCall was a remarkable soldier and observer. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, class of 1822, McCall kept a meticulous diary, later published as a book, Letters from the Frontiers. I found the handsome book decades ago at Special Collections, USF Tampa.

A gourmand, McCall held the Tampa Bay oyster in special exaltation. “Oysters growing on trees!” observed McCall in his diary. Lining the banks of bays

and rivers were miles of mangroves and during low tide, bushels of bivalves—called “coon oysters”– could be harvested simply by plucking the mollusk clinging to the exposed limbs.

“By and by,” exclaimed McCall in his diary in the Spring of 1824, “the lower [Tampa] Bay is the finest oyster-ground on the continent. . . . I have not eaten such oysters anywhere. A boat’s crew is detailed from the command twice a week, and they never fail to procure enough for all.”

McCall survived the Second Seminole War and lived to fight in the Mexican War and Civil War. A Pennsylvanian, he was captured by the Confederates and released in a prisoner exchange for the much- decorated Confederate with the colorful name, Simon Bolivar Buckner. His son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. was killed by a Japanese sniper at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. My father, who participated at the battle, talked frequently about that tragedy.

McCall was not alone in his praise for Tampa Bay. Clement Claiborne Clay spent the winter of 1851 in Tampa. An invalid, the future U.S. Senator had come to Florida for rejuvenation. Clay’s health improved dramatically, in part, because of his consumption of a local delicacy. “He sighed, “The oysters caught in the bay are larger and finer than any I ever saw.”

In the late 19th century, Tampa Bay oysters acquired a status among epicures. Noted the Tampa Tribune, March 7, 1887: “Tampa Bay oysters are fine and sell for one dollar a barrel at the wharf.” Fishermen brought to market prodigious quantities of Weedon Island, Rocky Point, and Cockroach Bay oysters—in their day equivalent to those prized mollusks from Chesapeake Bay and Wellfleet. Rich and poor feasted upon oysters fried, roasted, baked, fricasseed, and stuffed, but mostly they were slurped raw with brine still dripping from their shells.

Oysters were so prolific and cheap that denizens of New York City feasted frequently upon the mollusk that Mark Kurlansky titled his 2007 book about the subject, The Big Oyster.

In 1907, the St. Petersburg Times noted that Captain F.W. Taliaferro and sons “are very busily engaged in the midst of harvest on their oyster farm at Big Bayou, which this year has a very large crop of the finest quality.”

Locally, the R.S. Warner & Co. employed seven boats to stock Rocky Point oysters at its Port Tampa location. With affection, Cortez fishermen referred to Palma Sola Bay as “the kitchen,” because of the rich yields of oysters and scallops harvested there.

Hell-bent for commercial supremacy, Tampa and other communities paid little attention to the health of the bay that made possible prodigious harvests of fish, scallops, conch and oysters.

Well into the 20th century, cities routinely dumped raw sewage into the bay. An early warning occurred in 1945 when the State Board of Health condemned the oysters harvested in 22 areas, including Tampa Bay.

As late as 1950, on a stretch of beach from Pass-a-Grille to Bellaire, only one Pinellas County municipality had invested in a modern sewage system. The septic tank might qualify as the Florida mascot.

Oysters are so extraordinarily resilient that they can filter 50 gallons of water a day. Progress bore a price. Decades of dredge and fill, countless septic tanks, and three cross-Tampa Bay bridges destroyed much of the once prolific oyster beds. In 1963, a headline in the St. Petersburg Times warned, “Typhoid on Half Shell Lurks on the Suncoast.”

The construction of Davis Islands, Snell Isle, and the Gandy and Howard Franklin bridges, made possible the good life for generations of Floridians, but such dredge-and-fill operations doomed the oyster reefs.

Global warming—blamed for everything from recent hurricanes to the election of George W. Bush—also contributed to the demise of Tampa Bay oysters. Changes in the balance between salt and fresh waters also disrupted oyster beds.

It is unclear just when locally harvested oysters disappeared from menus, but in February 1981, Robert Boyle eulogized in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, “Tampa Bay, once a glory of a state, is filth. It’s a mess. There will never be an oyster in Tampa Bay again.” Christie Brinkley appeared on the cover.

The eulogy was premature. Marine biologists and Sunday boaters confirm that oysters do grow in Tampa Bay, but most are the inferior “coon oysters,” not the more glamorous Raw Bar, Eastern delicacy, “Crassostrea virginica.” Today, only a small reef near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge is suitable for oyster harvesting.

Perhaps one day, future generations will sit down to a plate of Tampa Bay oysters. If so, we should flock to a vintage theatre to enjoy the 1965 film “The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders,” with its memorable bivalve seduction scene—over a plate of oysters.

Considering the health warnings in recent years about raw oysters, keep in mind Roy Blount Jr.’s “Song to Oysters”:

“I like to eat an uncooked oyster
Nothing’s slicker, nothing’s moister. . . (but)
I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I’m sure my oyster died.”
—
Gary R. Mormino, Frank E. Duckwall Professor of Florida History, is the author of “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida,” among many other works. In 2003 the Florida Humanities Council named Mormino its first Humanist of the Year.

This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2025.