Industry & Aquaculture on California's Coast
Drake’s Bay Oyster Company was an historic oyster farm at the center of a high profile legal struggle—which reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—over public land law and the appropriate use of a popular “potential wilderness.” It was located on the California coast, in Marin County north of San Francisco, within the current boundaries of Point Reyes National Seashore. A key question in the conflict centered around the farm’s historic significance and its eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places: Hagen’s research for this project was conducted in order to answer that question.
Hagen traced commercial oyster farming on the West Coast from the time of the industry’s early 1900s collapse through the present. By the late 1930s, the California oyster fishery was reestablished in Drake’s Estero, and elsewhere, using Pacific seed oysters and cultivation methods imported from Japan. Industry growth stalled during the Second World War, which brought labor shortages and ended Japanese trade. After the war, Japanese oyster-seed imports resumed, and the California’s oyster industry revived. The owners of the Drake’s Bay oyster farm helped drive this postwar recovery: Charles Johnson and his Japan-born wife Maikiko embodied the industry’s links to Japan, and drew on that relationship to reshape oyster farming on the West Coast. The Johnsons’ successful adaptation of the Japanese hanging cultch growing method enabled their expansion into one of the largest commercial oyster producers in the state, and many other operations soon adopted varieties of off-bottom growing methods.
But while the oyster farming industry mushroomed in the postwar period so, too, did American interest in recreation and public lands. A host of midcentury legislation transformed public land management and brought many areas under new administrative mandates. Among them was Point Reyes National Seashore, which Congress established in 1962. Initially, federal policy permitted existing agricultural and aqua-cultural uses to continue. But after Drake’s Estero was designated a “potential wilderness” under legislation Congress passed in 1976, emergent land-management practices took a dimmer view of human habitation and industry therein. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Drake’s Bay oyster farm found itself in recurrent conflict with federal and state regulators and with official interpretations of lease rights. This conflict climaxed in 2012, with the expiration and attempted renewal of the Johnson’s initial long-term lease. It ultimately reached the chambers of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, becoming what some have dubbed an “oyster war.”
Supporters of the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company lost their legal fight, and the National Park Service removed the oyster farm in 2016.
Portions of this research served as the basis of an article-length report that answered key questions and informed legal processes in the “oyster war.”
Hagen traced commercial oyster farming on the West Coast from the time of the industry’s early 1900s collapse through the present. By the late 1930s, the California oyster fishery was reestablished in Drake’s Estero, and elsewhere, using Pacific seed oysters and cultivation methods imported from Japan. Industry growth stalled during the Second World War, which brought labor shortages and ended Japanese trade. After the war, Japanese oyster-seed imports resumed, and the California’s oyster industry revived. The owners of the Drake’s Bay oyster farm helped drive this postwar recovery: Charles Johnson and his Japan-born wife Maikiko embodied the industry’s links to Japan, and drew on that relationship to reshape oyster farming on the West Coast. The Johnsons’ successful adaptation of the Japanese hanging cultch growing method enabled their expansion into one of the largest commercial oyster producers in the state, and many other operations soon adopted varieties of off-bottom growing methods.
But while the oyster farming industry mushroomed in the postwar period so, too, did American interest in recreation and public lands. A host of midcentury legislation transformed public land management and brought many areas under new administrative mandates. Among them was Point Reyes National Seashore, which Congress established in 1962. Initially, federal policy permitted existing agricultural and aqua-cultural uses to continue. But after Drake’s Estero was designated a “potential wilderness” under legislation Congress passed in 1976, emergent land-management practices took a dimmer view of human habitation and industry therein. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Drake’s Bay oyster farm found itself in recurrent conflict with federal and state regulators and with official interpretations of lease rights. This conflict climaxed in 2012, with the expiration and attempted renewal of the Johnson’s initial long-term lease. It ultimately reached the chambers of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, becoming what some have dubbed an “oyster war.”
Supporters of the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company lost their legal fight, and the National Park Service removed the oyster farm in 2016.
Portions of this research served as the basis of an article-length report that answered key questions and informed legal processes in the “oyster war.”