“The man who first made a lot of money off terrapins in Maryland arrived in Crisfield in 1887.”

The story…

“Albert T. LaVallette Jr. moved to town with his new wife and began buying terrapins from local watermen and selling them to high-end restaurants in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. He set off the first great boom in terrapin fishing in the Chesapeake Bay, emerging as the "Terrapin King" of Crisfield and turning Crisfield into the terrapin capital of the east coast…

ALBERT LAVALLETTE JR. was probably born ambitious. His grandfather was a well-known admiral and his father a successful businessman, according to the family history unearthed by Eugene L. Meyer for Chesapeake Bay Magazine. Grandfather Elie LaVallette VI had commanded the U.S.S. Constitution, the warship famous in history as "Old Ironsides," and was eminent enough to have two naval destroyers and a town in New Jersey named after him. LaVallette's father, Albert Sr., worked in land development and was shrewd enough to talk some Philadelphia investors into forming the Manokin River Oyster Company near Crisfield.

LaVallette Jr. came to Crisfield with a clever plan. The town was already wildly busy with booming oyster businesses and a traditional blue crab fishery, so LaVallette focused his money-making schemes on the diamondback terrapin, an unexploited species that was prolific in the abundant shallows and marshlands of the lower Eastern Shore. Long seen as poor people's food, turtle meat had been eaten by early colonists, by soldiers in the Revolutionary army, by servants on tidewater plantations — but seldom by the well-off in the high-end restaurants of the Northeast.

In an early example of niche marketing, LaVallette traveled to cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York and sold the best-known restaurant in each city on a secret recipe for terrapin soup that he had picked up in the Caribbean. According to Glenn Lawson's account in The Last Waterman, each sales pitch included an entertaining performance with LaVallette as chef whipping up his secret soup with considerable flair in the restaurant's kitchen. Under his original deal, one restaurant in each city would have exclusive license to use his recipe, but it would have to charge a high price for the dish. And he, of course, would be the only supplier. As these elite restaurants advertised their exclusive LaVallette's Diamondback Terrapin, they created a strong brand that LaVallette later capitalized on. When it came time to renew the contracts, he expanded the market, making his now well-known recipe available to other restaurants in each town. He also raised his prices. Back in Crisfield, the terrapin fishing boom was on…

THE TERRAPIN FISHING BOOM that Albert LaVallette had unleashed around Crisfield made him briefly rich and socially prominent. He built a new home for his wife and two children, a large bungalow on the fringes of town out on Hammock Point. Behind the house were the pens where he stored all the terrapins he bought from local watermen, feeding the animals scraps of crab waste collected from local crab houses.

The boom soon went bust, a classic case of fishing a resource with little or no knowledge of the basic biology of the target species. Terrapins, it turned out, are easy to overfish. The largest and most profitable terrapins are the females who lay only a dozen eggs at a time and don't start doing that until they are eight years old. When watermen quickly fished out most of the females, they drove down population levels in Maryland for decades. In 1891, the new boom had watermen harvesting more than 35,000 terrapins for sale to high-end restaurants. Ten years later, they were harvesting fewer than 70.

By then terrapin soup was still the rage and overfishing episodes were common in many states along the east coast, perhaps sparked by LaVallette's early success in marketing his recipe. Declines in supply, of course, kept the price high for what was becoming a rare delicacy, and the high price kept driving fishing pressure and lowering the supply even more. What finally broke the cycle, according to scientists, was Prohibition. It outlawed the sherry that went into diamondback soup.

As the harvest declined, LaVallette's economic fortunes began to sink. Competitors cut into his market, and some began importing terrapins from the Carolinas and passing them off as "Chesapeakes" (much as crabs are shipped in today for use in "Maryland-style" crabcakes).

His personal life took an even more dramatic turn when he began an affair with his children's governess, Mary Bussey. It cost him his family and his house and his life in Crisfield. According to Meyer's account in Chesapeake Bay Magazine, LaVallette moved to Hampton, Virginia where he lived for decades on a houseboat with his new love. The local paper called him a "picturesque character" and a vivid story teller, once famous for breeding terrapins. He died a pauper in 1937 and was buried in the Hampton National Military Cemetery.

Terrapin populations in Maryland and many other states took decades to recover from the fishing frenzy LaVallette had helped unleash. Attempts to breed them in captivity were tried in several states, including North Carolina where scientists at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries Lab in Beaufort were describing the reproductive biology and growth rates that made terrapins so easy to overfish. After the commercial demand for terrapins dropped away, the lab released tens of thousands of hatchlings into the marshes and sounds of Atlantic and Gulf Coast states. More than 500 were released into Maryland waters.” (Michael W. Fincham; Maryland Sea Grant; Terrapins, The Fall & Rise; December 2008 vol. 7, no. 4)

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The Ruth-Elie, built by Albert LaVallette Jr. in 1889. Restored by the Liberatore family in 1999.