Site Credits
The first SKIPJACK, named after a fish, the jack, which skips across the Chesapeake's waters, sailed the Chesapeake Bay in the late 1800s. Not long thereafter, the Chesapeake Bay was dotted with hundreds of sail-powered fishing vessels, all searching for oysters, which were known to many fishermen as "Chesapeake Gold."

In the heyday of Chesapeake oystering, roughly the two decades following the Civil War, about 15 million bushels of oysters were harvested annually.

Today, the average annual yield is somewhere around 150,000 bushels, about 1 percent of the 1884 peak. Economics and pollution have nearly killed the fisheries of the Chesapeake Bay, and the once great Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fleet has dwindled to just a dozen working boats.


A handful of fishing vessels have been saved by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum where staff and volunteers are keeping alive the vessels and the skills that once fed the nation. Visit www.cbmm.org to learn more.
Click here for a Glossary of termsClick Here for links to other resourcesClick Here to Purchase the VideoClick here for Teaching Materials and other Resources USS Olympia, the nation's oldest surviving steel-hulled warshipThe skipjacks that once harvested one of the world's richest fisheries a century agoLiberty Ship John W. Brown, one of only two operational Liberty vessels remaining from World War IIC.A. Thayer, a three-masted sailing schooner built in the 1890s that hauled lumber from Washington to CaliforniaCoronet, the last of the great Victorian schooner yachts, built in 1885