The Oyster King’s Great Bay: How One Man Planted a Fortune in Puget Sound
While the rest of Seattle watches the markets, A.J. Burr is engineering a tidal empire at Marshville, turning mudflats into gold with dykes and 1,000 bushels of seed.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The oyster company under the management of our enterprising townsman Mr. A. J. Burr is making extensive preparations for planting the bivalves in the flats just below the Marshville bridge. The beds are laid out across the bay 25 feet wide by 50 feet long, and will be extended for a considerable distance down the bay.
A dyke two feet high, composed of mussel shells raked from the inside, encloses each bed, which is expected to retain the water at each ebb of the tide, thus keeping the oysters constantly covered with water. This arrangement will be serviceable in improving their quality. There are 1,000 bushels already planted and the planting will continue until all the suitable ground is covered.
Burr did not attend the regatta at Shoalwater Bay for nothing.—Transcript.
A.J. Burr’s industrial-scale oyster farming in Marshville (now part of Seattle’s Lake Washington shoreline) highlights how early Seattleites viewed natural resources not just as subsistence, but as high-tech agricultural real estate. Today, that same shoreline is a battleground for environmental regulation and housing density, yet the fundamental tension between commercial exploitation of the waterway and ecological preservation remains unchanged.
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