Do it. I feel strongly. When i take a quiet walk on the beach i just think of the ancient tribes that fished here. I think of all the salmon that was caught here. I dont know. It means a lot to me. It is home. It is a community of family. Ive lived here for 35 years. Ive raised both of my children here. You get to know your neighbors here. We have the border on one side and beaches on three sides. The boarder is a challenge. It change our daily lives continue outsidelycontinuously but it keeps our community quite and rural. That sense of community is rare and beautiful. In terms of adversity, absolutely precious. This is American History tv on cspan 3. Our 2014 cities tour has taken us on the road to cities across the america. Working with our cable partners, weve toured city sites and interviewed local historians. Coming up, highlights from our travels. See the schedule of where weve been and watch video from all of our stops. The importance of olympia oyster today is it was one of the industries that the town was built on. The Oysters Association with olympia is symbolic. Early on it was about industry and growth and progress. Now it has become a symbol of sort of environmental awareness in relation to future towns. The first people utilize the oysters were the inden ginnous people who lived here. That was a staple food for them. When early american settlers showed up in 1840s after they crossedcrossed the continent, they got here late in the year. It was too late to start farming. So a lot of them survived on shellfish. Shellfish gathering is the way native people interacted with white settlers. It was the women who gathered the oysters and brought them to town in baskets that they woven and traded them for things they needed like cloth or household items. The industry started as a result of the 1849 gold rush in california. A lot of people coming out to the gold rush already knew about oystered and had the tradition of seeing oysters as a celebratory food. If you were financial successful. So as San Francisco grew as the Financial Center for the gold rush, people began harvesting oystered from the coast. At that point, it was too far away by sailing ship. For oysters that were growing the olympia oyster, which are quite small, it wasnt until it reached olympia that they began largescale harvesting and export. It is about freshest and getting them from oyster bed to market as quickly as possible. So it arrived in 1878 then was the same year a number of Oyster Companies j. J. Brenner was founded. One of the strange growths from that, up and down the coast now they are own as the olympia oyster although they are inincidentinincidentous to the whir coast. They grow well here. Conditions are good for growing them so they are abundant. So the industry that grew up around extracting them from southeast sound and shipping them out wanted to brand them as olympia oysters. I came across an article that one of the early exporters admitted they hired people in larger cities cities in farther away to go into restaurants and demand olympia oysters so over time this particular species became known as olympia oysters. It has a unique coppery taste. It is a more delicate taste than the eastern oysters that are larger and the pacific oysters that were imported from japan. Regulation of the oyster industry came about early on. Washington was designated a territory in 1853. The First Legislature met in 1854. As part of the First Legislature, they imposed legislation because it was such a lucrative business on the coast. There was an oyster rush that was part of the gold rush. Over time as the industry grew up in south sound same sort of overproduction happened here, plus a lot of unsustainable practices. They would scoop up the oysters they could and what was not useable they would dump it on the beach. Within a few years owners of different businesses got together and started to come up with a list of best practices. The oyster played a part in keeping the capital in olympia. As Washington State grew, a number of other cities growing faster than olympia tried to get the capital moved capitol moved to their town. This is around 1900, the olympia oyster was famous and respected. So lobbyists for olympia keeping the capitol in olympia would invite lobbyists to come to the big oyster feeds and supply them with good food and good spirits to help them decide to keep the capitol in olympia. One newspaper referred to the oyster as the suck succulent lobbyists. There was more plywood mills and industries on the water that produced Chemical Waste in addition to biological waste that really impacted all species of oysters. So at that point, the industry got interested in Water Quality. They would dump their Chemical Waste into the water directly and there was a dieoff of oysters. So there with a conflict between the owners and the workers and the oyster industry to the point where there were protests near olifer ya by oyster workers who were counter protested by the mill workers. It took until the 1950s when puget sound was classified as the sixth most polluted waterway in the nation and they started in the late 1950s through the 1970s worked on cleaning things up. It wasnt until that time that things started to turn back around. The oyster growers were instrumental in lobbying for those changes. For a shellfish farmer, Water Quality is the utmost importance. Our Water Quality is very regulated. We have to have clean Water Quality. We got the clean water act in the 1970s and that was an amazing step forward for puget sound and the clean water act has been super important for us. It allows us to enforce clean water laws and since then, south puget sound has recovered amazingly. It is a resilient ecosystem. Now, weve seen upgrades of Water Quality just in the last few years in oakland bay where a huge area has gone to aploved. Were seeing that all around where people live in the waterfront and people who live in the basin realize that this is important economically and something that needs to be protected. The shellfish farmers, it our livelihood relies upon clean water. Were the second largest industry after the timber industry. Industry wide in Washington State, we have over 100 million in revenue and with a multiplier effect, it is closer to 200 in economic impact. We have approaching 3,000 employees industry wide employees or other industries that rely upon us as far as economic impact. Were at what we call the bowman farm. This is a farm that has been in Continuous Operation for over 100 years. Here were watching the oyster harvest. The way the process works the oysters are farmed 1012 feet below us. Last night, the boats came out and dumped the empty tubs and they sank to the bottom. They fill the tubs up and here we are the next day in the morning and the boat is picking up the tubs to transfer them to a truck and they will head to the plant where they will be cold cleaned processed and packaged and sent off to the final customer. So were in our half shell processing plant. In this plant we deal with all of our single oysters. They are all processed here. These ones are single beach pacific and they are going to be cold today and make it out to restaurants by tomorrow. When it is coming off the bay, this is the harvest container straight from the farm. He is moving the oysters to be washed cleaned. They will be hand graded and mechanically graded to make sure they are the right size. All the extra smalls are the same size and smalls and mediums are all the same size. This is the industry that the industry was based on until the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s when overharvest knocked the population back. Weve been farming them for a long, long time. Were one of the few companies that still produces them