Bellevue

About seven miles south of St. Michaels, along winding roads that pass country churches and farmhouses nestled in waving marsh grasses, there is a village known mostly, if it is known at all, as the terminus of the oldest privately operated ferry in the nation. It is Bellevue, in Talbot County, the western destination of the two-stop Oxford-Bellevue Ferry, which has operated since 1683. An official historical marker on site notes that it has run continuously since 1836.

What is not as clear from looking around is the rich history of African American entrepreneurs in Bellevue, though it is well-known among the locals. The Turner family of Bellevue operated a pair of seafood enterprises that thrived for almost 50 years on this rural peninsula of Talbot County, where decades earlier Frederick Douglass had been enslaved near St. Michaels.

It was not the only Black seafood business in the county but one of several; Coulbourne & Jewett Seafood Packing Company would become the largest employer in St. Michaels for several years, and many Black entrepreneurs owned seafood processing plants, captained skipjacks, and ran oyster shucking businesses as well as their own water-related enterprises. The Turners were known for an industrious work ethic as well as innovative practices, such as insisting that crabs be sold by weight and not volume so as not to cheat the buyer with the larger ones filling out the top of the bushel. 

“Ever since I was 13 or 14 years old, I got the idea of what working and being involved with business was like. When we got out of school, I automatically knew, without pay, I’d have to go down there,” said Alex Green, a Turner descendant who grew up in Bellevue and now owns Harriet Tubman Tours, a historical touring company in Dorchester County. “I do what I do now because of who my grandfather [Otis Turner] was. My grandfather was a storyteller.”

The story of how Bellevue thrived, and how the Turners helped it thrive, could be a book, or at least a graduate school thesis. But even the broad outlines of the story sketch a family so innovative and hard-working that those who knew them still fondly recall their contributions to the industry.

The Turner’s legacy in Bellevue began in 1891, with William Samuel Turner. The man known as “Sam Sr.” came to Baltimore from Kentucky and took a job ferrying freight up and down the Chesapeake Bay for the seafood industry, as well as wheat and other farm staples and even bricks and construction materials, eventually working his way up to captain of a schooner. By 1899, he was traveling to Bellevue to serve the Valliant family cannery, which William Valliant, a white businessman, owned. Along with the seafood plant, Valliant owned most of the houses and a company store. Valliant soon offered Turner the job of captaining the company's schooner, the S.J. Delan. So, Sam moved to Bellevue and stayed to work for Valliant.

Like Valliant, Sam Sr. was a white man. He married Rachel, a Black woman, and had one child, Aubrey, with her. After Rachel died, he married his second wife, Alma (Moore) Turner, also a Black woman. He had three more sons: William, Otis, and Kermit.

In 1937, Aubrey and his son Samuel “Eddie” Turner bought two acres off Tar Creek in Bellevue for what they said was a chicken operation—an industry beginning to take off on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Eddie Turner had earned the money to buy it from his work at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. He sent the money home, his son, Edzel Turner, recalled. They had always intended to turn the operation into a seafood plant, Edzel added.

By the early 1940s, the Turner family ran the largest seafood operation in town, and many Black watermen in the village worked for them.

To this day, a large percentage of Bellevue’s residents are Black homeowners, according to Edzel Turner, though he said the community’s demographics are slowly shifting as white residents move to the area.

According to the Maryland Historic Trust—based on an interview with Hayward Turner, another one of Eddie Turner’s sons, who has since passed away—their crabmeat was sent to at least 11 major companies on the Shore at that time for distribution. Those included J.M. Clayton Company in Cambridge, United Shellfish in Grasonville, and Bay Food Products in Baltimore.

“The Turners were such great innovators, thinkers, and businessmen that they shifted the market,” Alex Green said. “It was a thriving business. It was a big enterprise going on.”

These were times when Black entrepreneurs were asserting themselves in the seafood business. Among them were the Coulbourne & Jewett Seafood Packing Company, which became one of the first in the Chesapeake Bay to sell crabs and crabmeat, as the estuary at that time was mostly known for its oysters.  

By the 1940s, about 100 people were employed year-round shucking oysters, steaming crabs, and shipping product. Advances in freezing and shipping helped the business grow until the 1960s, when shellfish harvests declined.

In 1972, Tropical Storm Agnes and the record rainfall that accompanied it led to a drop in Chesapeake Bay salinity. The reduced salinity, combined with high water temperatures, devastated the soft-shell clam fishery and hobbled the oyster industry, as these shellfish were particularly stressed by the changes in environmental conditions. Blue crabs were what they had left, Edzel Turner recalled, but it at times didn’t feel like much to hold on to. “We were more or less in survival mode,” said Edzel. “It was hard to get enough product to stay in business.”

As late as the 1970s, the Turners’ two seafood companies employed about 70 people, many of them town residents, according to the Bellevue Village Master Plan prepared by Talbot County. 

But eventually, the Turners could no longer hold on as the clam, oyster, and blue crab fisheries declined. In 1996, W.A. Turner & Sons closed. Two years later, Bellevue Seafood Company shut its doors.

The Turner companies were far from the only seafood processors to go under because of changes beyond their control, among them oyster diseases, natural disasters, the boom and bust cycle of crabs, and environmental changes. Today, the Maryland Department of Agriculture lists 20 licensed oyster and crab processors, down from hundreds in their heyday.

Still, nearly five decades in the seafood business was a significant achievement for a Black family, according to Vincent Leggett, historian and founder of Blacks of the Chesapeake Foundation. Leggett has spent a large part of the last three decades interviewing Black mariners, watermen, sailmakers, and seafood entrepreneurs. He knew the elder Turners well, and visited the company before it closed for good.  

Leggett said that the Turners and the few other Black businesses at the time had to push against a deck often stacked against them. Some, he said, had to give their oysters to white men to sell for them at a higher price because buyers would not purchase from Black men. Other times, the seafood packers would “run out” of ice when it was time for a Black man to pack his oysters, meaning they would spoil and become worthless. For Leggett, the myth of no color on the water didn’t hold up the deeper he went into his interviews. 

Russell Dize, a longtime Tilghman Island waterman who is white, worked with many Black captains when he had a seafood processing business. He knew the Turners well. Much has changed, he said, in the years since their seafood businesses closed. And a lot of it not for the better, as the fisheries of the Chesapeake have struggled and so many of his friends, Black and white, have had to leave the business.

“We’ve lost most of our Black watermen; we don’t have that many in Talbot County now,” said Dize, now 79. “It’s a way of life, gone.”

Chesapeake Quarterly writer Wendy Mitman Clarke contributed to this story.