Oysters

[L Verge]

We know that Mrs. Gideon Welles was one of the Washington society ladies who got along with Mrs. Lincoln, but there must have been at least one other Cabinet wife who could tolerate her - at least through a dinner engagement.

At our fall dinner and program with the Surratt Society on September 21, the author of a history of the great restaurants in Washington, D.C. over 200 years will be speaking. In his book on Capital Eats, he has included a history of Harvey's Oyster House, which opened in 1858 and remained open until the early-1990s.

In that history, John DeFerrari states that the restaurant was already popular among the soldiers during the Civil War, but that it gained real prestige in 1863, when Secretary Seward and his wife invited President and Mrs. Lincoln to dine there. A special room was set up for them in the back of the restaurant, and Mr. Lincoln enjoyed his first meal of Harvey's steamed oysters - instantly becoming a Harvey's enthusiast.

The author goes on to say that, at that time, the restaurant was steaming five hundred wagonloads of oysters a week and producing huge, fifty-foot-high piles of shells that had to be trucked away. During the Civil War, Harvey's advertised that their little pung boats were breaking the blockade on the Potomac River daily in order to bring nature's best to the D.C. restaurant.

The Chesapeake Bay, Patuxent River, and Potomac River are world-known for their delicious oysters that are prepared in a variety of ways. My daughter once did a paper for college on the effect of the oyster industry on American economy, and the figures up until the mid-1900s are staggering. They had a huge effect on the growth of the railroad system in terms of derived revenue and getting them to a growing audience in America's heartland.

When I was a child, fried oysters or oyster stew were weekly meals at our house - except in the months without Rs. From September through Thanksgiving, we also made the rounds of church suppers that featured fried oysters and ham, fried oysters and turkey, or just fried oysters. Gone are those good days, and gone are the abundant supplies of oysters. We nearly cooked them out of existence by the 1960s.