The Age: Nelsons turn oystering into a way of life at Smith Point

By Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum in Wallisville

During the late 1800s, there was much economic decline in the Scandinavian countries, and many suffered from poverty with little opportunity to improve their status in life. Under the United States Homestead Act of 1862, immigrants could claim 160 acres of land, which was extremely attractive to those living in overpopulated Norway where land was at a premium. A mass exodus began from the Scandinavian countries; the peak year for emigration to the U.S. was 1882, with over 105,000 arrivals. The 1880s saw the largest influx of Scandinavian immigrants, including Norwegians, with approximately 176,000 Norwegians arriving in the U.S. during that decade.

“Karl Mathais Nielsen came to America from Arendal, Norway, as a young cook on a sailing vessel into Galveston, Texas, in 1881. He received his citizenship papers in Galveston, Texas, on March 10, 1890. At that time, he changed his name from Karl Mathais Nielsen to Charles Martin Nelson. From then on he was known as Charlie,” said the late Evelyn Standley of her grandfather, Charlie Nelson.

“They came for religious freedom and a better way of life. He had to walk by the cotton mill on his way to his longshoreman’s job. After some days of being whistled at, he and my grandmother, Mary Floyd, met and married shortly thereafter. Charles and Mary Floyd, with two children, moved from Galveston in a sailing vessel to Anahuac, TX, after the 1900 hurricane. They then moved to Double Bayou until Nov. 12, 1912, when they arrived with seven children in a motorless sailboat named Nancy on Smith Point,” she concluded.

And thus began a multi-generational legacy of life on the water.

Charlie’s entire family was involved in the fishing industry in some form or another. His eldest son and namesake, Charles Martin “Jake,” was a boat builder.

“He built 40-foot boats in Tarkington Prairie, then hauled them to ‘The Point’ and put them in the water,” said niece Necil Kelly. She continued, “Lawrence also had an oyster house at Smith Point for a long time, and Aunt May married Curtis Sherman, and they had a commercial shrimping business.”

Although they were all involved in the industry, Charlie’s son Neal was the one who continued the family tradition in the fishing business long-term. He in turn passed that legacy down to his three sons — Joe, Ben, and the youngest of his children, Eddie Lee. Joe and Ben started oystering in early grade school. They would feel for oysters on a local reef with their bare feet. After shucking the oysters, they would take them to school and sell them to their teachers as a way to make a little spending money.

Charlie’s one daughter, Necil, also carried on the family legacy, working side by side with her dad. She married Alton Kelley, a pipefitter turned fisherman.

“Alton always wanted to be a fisherman, and I always say he married the family business, not me,” laughed Necil.

“It started out as Nelson’s Oyster House back in the early ’50s,” noted Necil. “We did everything — oyster, fish, shrimp, crab — and we did it all with nets. Many a ton of fish went through Nelson’s Oysters. The boys were all involved, but when they went off to the military, Daddy kept up the business and I helped him with everything.”

While Ben Nelson was in the Navy in the early ’60s and stationed in Florida, he met the love of his life, Betty Geraldine “Jeri” Smith. They married shortly after his discharge from the Navy, and he brought his bride home to his beloved Smith Point. After returning from military service, Ben continued to work with his father, Neal, until commercial fin fishing was outlawed.

Gradually, the Nelson boys ventured out into their own individual enterprises. Ben initially bought a shrimp boat and pursued shrimping for several years until entering the oyster business.

“He applied for his first oyster lease in 1968, and we still have it to this day. It’s probably the oldest lease in Galveston Bay,” said grandson and current vice-president of Jeri’s Seafood, Justin Woody.

Justin is the son of Tracy Woody, who arrived in Smith Point around 1980 and married the girl next door, Terri Nelson. He is the current president of Jeri’s Seafood.

“When Ben and Joe came back from the service, they went into partnership,” stated Necil. “Then Ben decided he would make a go on his own. Joe started Fisherman’s Harvest — it was an oyster house, fish house, shrimp house, with a restaurant above it. His and Ben’s businesses were within a hundred yards of each other. Eddie had his own private boat and fished offshore.

“When I was little, Mom peddled fish all over Anahuac, Hankamer, and Double Bayou, and I went with her,” concluded Necil, recalling her fond memories of time spent with her mother.

During the ’60s and ’70s, Neal, along with his sons Joe and Ben, were pioneers in the battle against companies that were indiscriminately dredging oyster reefs as a source of materials for roads, concrete, and various other products. The companies gave no thought to the fact that they were dredging up live oysters, many of which were used for the base layer of Interstate 10. Neal and his sons took a stand in the water in front of the dredging machines.

Farming Oysters

“We farm,” said Justin Woody. “The only difference between us and a regular farmer is we farm what we can’t see. All the state waters are held in the land trust for the citizens of Texas. Essentially, you have to go to the state and apply for a permit for a location. Oysters are unique in that they don’t move in a water column like shrimp and fish. If an oyster sits there and grows, it’s going to stay in that location, so you can actually lease out a spot to be able to harvest them.

“When my grandfather started leasing, you had all the shell dredging going on in Galveston Bay. There was something to the tune of 180,000,000 cubic yards of shell harvested out of Galveston Bay alone from shell dredging. I think there were 300,000,000 cubic yards in the whole state of Texas. They used it to pave all the roads and to build the Astrodome. He started getting leases as a way to protect them from shell dredgers.”

Justin continued with the history: “Texas Parks and Wildlife, I believe, was founded in 1963, and the governor is the one who appoints commissioners for the Parks and Wildlife. Up until 1963, there had to be a minimum of two-foot overburden over a reef before they could mine it for shell, and you had to stay about 1,200 feet from a live reef. In 1963, within about three months of Texas Parks and Wildlife being created, there was no more regulation for overburden, which meant the reef didn’t have to be covered in mud in order for them to dredge it.

“Not only did they eliminate that rule, but now they could dredge within 300 feet of a live oyster reef. There was also a rule that if an oyster reef was dead, there was no more overburden requirement, so they could go in and mine these reefs. On Todd’s Dump across the Bay, they went in and set up two dredge boats on each side, and all the silt from their dredging covered the reef and killed it. Then they said, ‘This is no longer a live reef, so we can mine it.’

“The state was making a million dollars a year in revenue from shell dredging — that was a lot of money in 1963,” exclaimed Justin. “They sold it as a renewable resource, which it is if you’re just taking the oysters off the top and leaving the reef there. But they were making fifty-foot holes out in the bay. That’s not sustainable harvesting. My grandfather and great-grandfather Neal were out there in front of the dredge boats, because supposedly there weren’t any live oysters there on the reef. They were sitting there in front of the dredge head holding clusters of live oysters saying, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be dredging here, what’s going on?’

“That’s when he got his first lease, and there were still a lot of oysters in the bay at that time. In 1989, they put a moratorium on oyster leases, and there has not been an oyster lease issued in the state of Texas since then. They rarely ever change hands. The average age of our oyster leases is 48 years old. We are the largest lease owner in Texas.

“In 1970, my grandparents started Jeri’s Seafood, named for my grandmother. They started out small with oysters, shrimp, fish — anything they could make money on. I even worked on the shrimp boats when I was a kid. Eventually, in the late ’90s or early 2000s, other than shrimping for ourselves, we went strictly to oysters. The shrimp industry was already dying. They had started the buy-back program in the shrimp industry and put a moratorium on shrimp licenses. You had all these shrimpers who sold their shrimp license back to the state, so they went to oyster fishing with their boats.

“In 2005, my grandpa and my dad went to Austin and got a moratorium put on oyster licenses. What they wanted them to do was make a stipulation that if you had bought an oyster license in the last couple of years, then you could buy one. But the state said, ‘No, what we’re going to do is make the requirement that you have to buy a license by August of that year.’

“We went from historically 250–300 oyster licenses being sold in the state of Texas to 900-and-something that year. That’s a large increase. Not everyone used them, but if they did, that would be a considerable increase in the number of boats in the bay during oyster season,” he exclaimed.

Poachers . . . Taking What Isn’t Theirs

“A lot of things have changed in the oyster industry. You used to have a bunch of local guys who would poach on our oyster leases. Now, those guys are pretty much gone, and almost everyone else who oysters on the public reef uses visa workers. They don’t want to get in trouble, so they follow the laws,” said Justin.

Ben Nelson, who ruled a quarter of the oyster leases in Galveston Bay in 1999, kept a constant vigil on his leases, marked at each corner with a floating vertical buoy anchored to the bottom and labeled with identification. “There’s a buoy on each corner of our lease marked with the lease number,” clarified Justin. “And in between we put PVC pipe to mark the area.”

Ben patrolled his areas by boat or from the cab of his pickup equipped with a pair of field glasses, a two-way radio, and a cell phone. If he spotted a suspicious boat near his leases, he would radio the warden and request a “make” on the boat and photos.

However, he didn’t always seek support from the game warden. If he happened upon a poacher on his lease, his boat was equipped with an AR-15 hunting rifle. One winter’s day, he and his wife Jeri were out boating for fun when Ben spied a rig well known in poaching circles. He told Jeri the man was known for carrying a gun and told her to get down on the floorboard of the boat.

Ben slipped up next to him and stuck the barrel of his gun through the wheelhouse into the poacher’s ear. The safety was off, and the man immediately wet his pants and complied. Ben said he didn’t care if you were stealing his oysters, his wife, or his money — you shouldn’t be messing with what didn’t belong to you.

“I used to sleep out there every night,” laughed Justin. “My grandpa used to make me sleep out there on the boat to keep an eye out for poachers. We haven’t had any problems in recent years,” he added.

Thrive or Struggle . . . the Weather Decides

“I’d say the really big change in the oyster business was when Ike hit in 2008,” surmised Justin. “When Ike hit, they estimate we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 acres of reef in Galveston Bay. It silted them over and killed out the live oysters. Sometimes when you have a storm, the storm may move the mud off an old reef and now you have a new reef. Other times, they cover up a lot of reefs — it’s just ‘Mother Nature.’

“Oysters are kind of the canary of the bay system. If oysters are doing good, everything’s doing good. In 2010, we had the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The oil spill itself didn’t impact the oysters here, but it seriously impacted the Louisiana oyster industry. Louisiana and Texas have always been the largest oyster producers — Louisiana is number one and Texas is number two. When the BP disaster hit, the entire state of Louisiana shut down for oystering for about two years.

“Now all the pressure came to Texas to meet the oyster demands for the nation. All the people who bought oyster licenses and were just sitting on them now entered the business to make the harvest demands, bringing an influx of boats to the bay. In 2011–2012, we had a horrible drought that killed a lot of oysters. Oysters like a range of salinity between 10–28 parts per thousand. The Gulf is probably about 35 parts per thousand. They can live in the higher salinity, but they become weak, and predators that eat oysters thrive in the higher salinity.

“You take an oyster that is already in poor health, and there’s more predation that eats them. They can survive below five parts per thousand, which is really fresh, but they can’t survive for very long.

“Our most recent battle is fighting for more leases. There are only 2,300 leases in the entire state of Texas. Louisiana has 420,000 acres. Maryland and Virginia combined have somewhere near 200,000 acres. In the 2003–2004 era in Virginia — we’re talking about the Chesapeake Bay area — they pretty much lost all their harvest . . . 100%. With private leasing and restoration efforts, in late 2022–2023, they beat out Texas in oyster production.

“In 2021, Texas allowed mariculture — oysters grown in cages, a common practice on the East Coast. It’s not that practical in Texas due to the size of our bays, where wind is a factor.”

He went on: “Typically, during the ’60s to the ’90s, Galveston Bay was the largest producer of oysters in the state of Texas. Before the ship channel was dredged and all the shell mining began, Galveston was not. The ship channel began in the 1900s and went from a 10-foot deep channel to a 50-foot deep channel now.

“Basically, the only zone you had with quality to grow oysters really good was Hannah’s Reef, which comes through East Bay and wraps around (in years past, Hannah’s Reef was used to run cattle from Smith Point to Bolivar) and Redfish Reef, which starts at Smith Point and goes to San Leon. So you had those two big reefs there where only the good production was because everything else was too fresh. All the areas up in East Bay and Trinity Bay were too fresh to grow oysters. There wasn’t any water circulation and there weren’t any nutrients.

“Once they dredged the ship channel and shell mined some of the reefs, they started getting more saltwater circulation in the bay, increasing the habitable zone for oysters. In the early 1900s, the lower bays were more productive than Galveston Bay. In the ’50s or ’60s, Galveston Bay became the most productive. Now it is shifting back to the southern bays. There’s a balance, and now you’re getting too far in the opposite direction — the ship channel is getting too big, bringing too much salinity, and causing the habitable zone for oysters to move closer to fresh water. Oysters like brackish water.

“Salt water is thirty-five parts per thousand. They’ll survive in that, but they don’t like it. Eight to ten parts is their low; twenty-eight parts is their high. The Gulf is thirty-five parts per thousand or higher, and of course, fresh water is zero. During the drought of 2012, there were a lot of oysters that were produced out of upper Trinity Bay, but since then, there hasn’t been another oyster harvested out of there.

“Then you got into the 2015 flood and 2017, and then last year we had Hurricane Beryl. That’s the most oysters we’ve ever lost,” proclaimed Justin sadly. “We had all the rain that killed a lot of oysters, but all of East Bay got really fresh — it hovered around three to five parts per thousand — and the oysters were just barely hanging on.

“Then you had Beryl come in about this time last year, and you went from three to five parts per thousand in East Bay up to thirty parts per thousand overnight. The oysters were already stressed out from being so fresh for so long it just killed almost all of them. If it would have just gradually raised up and we didn’t have Beryl come in, we would have probably only lost 20 percent of our oysters. But with Beryl, we lost 80–90 percent.

“So, to sum it up, the biggest detriment to the oyster industry is the ship channel expansions, severe weather events, and harvest pressure. Losing all your oysters is a bad thing — you’ve lost a lot of oysters and a lot of money — but now you’ve got all these dead oysters that have opened up and are sitting there to catch fresh spat, and you don’t have to go out and provide the cultch for them. The spat really like the clean surface the dead oysters provide for them,” he noted, recognizing the silver lining in the tragedy.