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For more than 200 years the residents of Somers Cove, the southern-most town in Maryland, lived in virtual isolation, pulling seafood from the Chesapeake Bay and farming the flat lowlands. John Woodland Crisfield would change all that.
A prominent attorney in nearby Princess Anne, Crisfield practiced law for 65 years. He also published the Somerset County Herald and was elected to Congress. While serving in Washington, Crisfield became a close personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. With 600 miles of Chesapeake Bay shoreline in Somerset county, Crisfield looked into the future and could clearly see the area as a leading seafood producer.
In 1867 he engineered the groundwork to bring the railroad from Delmar, Maryland down the Eastern Shore to Somers Cove. Oysters now flowed in an unbroken torrent from the beds of the Chesapeake to big eastern markets. In time there would be 150 oyster packing plants operating in town. When the town officially incorporated in 1872, grateful residents named it Crisfield.
Billions of oysters were harvested in the following years. By 1910, the Crisfield Customs House boasted the largest registry of sailing vessels of any port in America. The shells filled the foundations of buildings and roads and railroads. Then, in the 1920s the oyster supply, believed inexhaustible, gave out. The town declined but survived on the back of a more reliable crustacean, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, considered the most delectable in the world.
Today a trip to Crisfield is an immersion in blue crab culture. You can watch the crabs hauled onto the docks by commercial watermen or visit any stretch of Chesapeake waterfront and join Marylanders young and old dangling handlines into the brackish water of muddy estuaries and coves in catching the blue crab. The town museum and even outdoor exhibits explain the life cycle of the jimmies (adult male blue crabs) and sooks (adult female blue crabs).
For crab enthusiasts there is no better time to visit Crisfield than labor Day Weekend for the National Hard Crab Derby. Crabs are to Maryland what horses are to Kentucky. And since Kentucky has a derby for horses why shouldn't Maryland have a derby for crabs. It was thinking like that by an editor of the Crisfield Times in 1946 that led to the first Hard Crab Derby the following year. A tub of ornery crustaceans was dumped in the middle of a 20-foot chalk circle in the middle of Main Street, with the first crab reaching the chalk line declared the winner. It didn't take long for competitors to begin taking the race semi-seriously. By 1948 the crabs were being named when Scoobie scooted to victory.
Now the crabs race in heats on a specially designed crab track. Crabs are among nature's most beautiful swimmers in the open water and on land the blue-shelled beasts do have enough torque to propel themselves admirably - if somewhat aimlessly - along the track. As many as 300 crabs can be entered in the quest for a trophy presented by the Maryland Governor's Office.
Of course winners and losers all meet the same fate. Eating a crab is known as "picking" and first-timers should do so in the company of a veteran picker. The prime meat from a blue crab comes from the body, adjacent to the backfin and is known as "lump." The backfin meat is usually used in crab cakes and crab imperial. Flakes of body meat other than choice lump are called "special" and are reserved, along with claw meat, for soups and dips.
All should be sampled before turning the car around and heading back up the Eastern Shore away from Crisfield.
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