Clam South

Hold our beer, oysters. We’re exploring Southern clam culture, from Virginia to Florida. 

Words by Caroline Hatchett | Photos by Jared Bramblett

I dashed to my car, full on a dinner of clam pie, just as a rainstorm began to pelt Wachapreague, Virginia. Flashes of lightning and the last bit of daylight illuminated droplets as they splattered onto my windshield, and watching that water shimmer, just for a moment, I imagined millions of clams spitting on me from the heavens.

I had been thinking a lot, maybe an unnatural amount, about clams — the hard-shell kind, Mercenaria mercenaria, the northern quahog. Many months before, an old Tripadvisor post from ChinaCatRider had gotten under my skin: “Never seen any clam digging since I have moved south (1995) Clam digging is a northern activity. Clams down here are just not as good as they are up north.”

Now here I was on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, only a few days into a multistate hunt for Southern clam culture, and already I had visions of clams baptizing my journey.

On special occasions, my mother prepares clams casino — incongruently, I might add, in scallop shells. Whenever my husband visits our family in South Florida, he gets a hankering for clam dip served with Ruffles and a martini. But mostly, I have eaten clams elsewhere: on pizza from Frank Pepe in Connecticut, in piles of spaghetti vongole in my adopted home of New York City, and with perfect soupy rice on the Portuguese coast.

Ed Atkins holds a freshly harvested chowder clam.

Clams don’t take up much space, if any, in the South’s culinary consciousness. A year ago, if pressed, I couldn’t have named a single Southern clam dish or notable clamming town. It is true. Beachgoers don’t load up in cars and head to Hilton Head as they do on the Cape, walking, buckets in hand, to the shore to clam. Southern clambakes (yes, they do exist) aren’t the stuff of American holidays and mythmaking.

But our coasts hold an older truth, if you know where to look, and if gated communities haven’t swallowed it up and rising sea levels haven’t washed it away. Middens, those heaps of refuse formed by Indigenous people, stand testament to ancient clam harvests and roasts. More often than not, near those whitewashed mounds — in fishing villages and off barrier islands — folks are clamming still, some for fun and others to feed families across the country.

This is not a showy bunch, but clam people know the peculiarities and rhythms of their waterways like their own kin. They have witnessed waves eat up shorelines and break through barrier islands. They know when mullet run and crabs molt, and where clams seek refuge. Clams have paid for their pickup trucks and divorces; they fill freezers and church coffers. Clams are an August afternoon shared among friends, an excuse to dive into cooling, silty water. Clams are an honest day’s work.

But — let’s get this out of the way — they cannot compete with oysters’ sex appeal, those vixens who at low tide peacock their flesh like a Bourbon Street call girl. Clams are subtler creatures, revealing themselves only to folks who can read their sign language, some of which I’d learn as I trekked down the East Coast from Virginia and the Outer Banks through the Lowcountry and  Florida’s Gulf Coast.

This is the Clam South, a scattered region with shared stories of adaptation, hurricanes, regulatory battles, subsistence, pleasure, and pride — and what we have to lose.

Ann Gallivan sat me down in front of a microscope, and through the lens I could see wriggling clam larvae — three microns in width but already looking very much like clams. “They’re adorable,” says Gallivan, CEO of JC Walker Brothers, a clam aquaculture outfit in Willis Wharf, Virginia. Gallivan, a scientist by training, thinks of herself as a rubber-boots CEO; she owns more than 25 pairs of the mud-ready footwear. She’s also one of the best clam propagators in the world.

Clam sex, says Gallivan, never gets old. Each spring, her team brings clam broodstock into JC Walker Brothers’ hatchery and gets them comfy. After a few weeks, workers raise the water’s temperature, which tricks the clams into thinking it’s spring. The prospect of warm weather gets clams mighty excited, and, inevitably, they start pumping their respective gametes into the water. “It’s so cool. You get to see sperm and egg unite,” says Gallivan. “In eight hours, you have a little clam.”

For months, Gallivan feeds hundreds of millions of these “seed” clams a precise regimen of phytoplankton grown in beakers and in colors of chartreuse and ochre. Willis Wharf, population 210, is home to six such hatcheries, and the companies headquartered there produced around 250 million hard clams in 2023. Cherrystone Aquaculture, one of the largest clam growers in the country, employs 200 people and works with another 80 co-op farmers.

The story of modern clam farming begins in Willis Wharf — and with oysters. In the 1970s, the Mid-Atlantic region suffered a massive oyster die-off courtesy of two parasites, Dermo and MSX. Overharvest and pollution didn’t help, either, and families who had made their living off the bivalves for nearly a century faced an uncertain future. Around the same time, the Virginia Marine Institute of Science began to experiment with clam propagation, and by the early ’80s Willis Wharf’s established fishing families had signed on to help. Researchers delivered seed to watermen, who tried to grow it under spent oyster shells, on barges, and in cages. Finally, they landed on sowing the clam seed in the muck and covering it with netting to prevent predation. A decade later, they yielded a commercial crop.

“The first year we ended up with a million clams apiece, we thought we’d hit the mother lode. We just couldn’t fathom being able to produce that many clams,” says Pete Terry, owner of 121-year-old H.M. Terry Co. “Then it was off to the races.”

I met Terry, his daughter Heather Lusk, and his chocolate lab Barbecue at an hour when I’m usually still drinking my first cup of coffee so that we (well, everyone except Barbecue) could catch the low tide. Terry steered us from his dock at Willis Wharf through Parting Creek into the Great Machipongo River and out into Hog Island Bay, where juvenile clams spend the winter protected from Northeast winds and waves. In spring, workers peel back the beds’ netting, rake the clams from the mud, sort them, and replant them on new ground, where the clams will grow to market size. After two to three years, these littlenecks (⅞ to 1 inch), middle necks (1 to 1¼ inch), and top necks (1¼ to 1½ inch) will grace New York City raw bars and anchor Rhode Island clambakes. Most of Willis Wharf’s output goes to Northeastern markets. 

Terry, wearing camouflage waders, strides through the mudflats while I awkwardly Bambi-leg my way to the clam beds. He kneels down in the mud and slices through the cover net that shields hundreds of thousands of clams. Exposed at low tide, they are a living fountain, spitting seawater into the morning air.

Unlike the Chesapeake Bay, Willis Wharf, on the sea side of the Eastern Shore, is not influenced by inland waterways that deliver farm and industry runoff and freshwater inundation. Clams require higher salinity levels than other shellfish, and juvenile clams have an even smaller threshold for fresh water and pollutants.

Willis Wharf’s water quality is also indebted to the foresight of Virginia’s Nature Conservancy. In the 1970s, folks noticed real estate developers gobbling up South Carolina’s barrier islands, so the organization stepped in to buy Virginia’s barrier islands one by one. The mainland, too, has resisted development. Historically, says Terry, Eastern Shore families had a healthy mix of watermen and farmers, a reason he suspects aquaculture took as well as it did.

But the balance is tenuous. Retirees have discovered the Eastern Shore, and NIMBYs complain about clam beds sullying the views from their docks. “We’ve had a major turnover of the population, so you don’t have the relationship to the land and to the water that there used to be,” says Terry.

In Willis Wharf, you can eat this tension of old and new and progress and decline, sandwiched between two slices of white bread with a squirt of yellow mustard. On the day I met the Terrys, providence delivered Randolph Widgeon for a visit and an ad hoc clam fritter tutorial. Widgeon, 90, grew up in the nearby town of Oyster, and his late wife Yvonne’s people were part of a mass exodus from Hog Island to Willis Wharf after a 1933 hurricane devastated the island.

No two cooks make clam fritters alike, but most everyone on the Eastern Shore agrees that they are not round, puffy things, a cousin to hushpuppies. They are pancake flat, and the best have crispy, lacey edges and just a few ingredients: clams (ground or finely chopped), flour, egg, often onion. Widgeon says the batter must be dry; you mix flour into clams and some of their liquor until the batter slowly drops, rather than runs, off the spoon and into the hot grease of a cast iron skillet.

Widgeon makes fritters for himself at home, but he also prepares them by the hundreds for fundraisers at the Community Church of God. “It’s clam fritter and ham dinners,” says Terry of this salty Eastern Shore surf and turf staple. The Presbyterians sell them, too. Fritter plates from the Cheriton United Methodist Church’s semiannual sale sell out by noon.

Eastern Shore clam cooking is based on a few centuries of harvesting chowder clams, the big boys at least 4 inches across. With no crop insurance to speak of, it’s too risky for clam farmers to grow them out that large. There’s not much of a market for them anyway. For Widgeon and another friend’s fritter needs, Terry goes out and harvests chowders himself, and Widgeon stores them in a 40-year-old chest freezer until he needs them for a fundraiser.

When I asked Gallivan how she eats clams, she joked, “My husband says not in public. I devour them.” At home, she shucks and tops her clams with bacon and onions, sometimes parmesan or barbecue sauce. “We’re as creative as our fridge allows,” she says.

Gallivan loves clam fritters, too, but doesn’t have the fritter finesse of a multigenerational native. When she craves one, she takes a seat at the counter of Sean Hart’s Exmore Diner. I followed her lead. My fritter, wide as a salad plate, extended inches beyond the crust of soft, squishy white bread, exposing its crispy, lacey edges. I glopped on French’s mustard to deliver a kick. And the clams were chopped so finely I could barely discern their texture; just their essential clamness was preserved.

It took days to fully get the mud out from beneath my toenails.

On a warm spring afternoon, I rode with a team of clamming instructors from a dock in Atlantic, a speck of a coastal village in Carteret County, North Carolina, out into Core Sound. In just 10 minutes we were tethered to a duck blind anchored atop a clam bed. I jumped out into water that rose nearly thigh high. Skate fluttered around my bare feet, and eelgrass tickled my ankles. I pushed a bull rake gently across the sound’s bottom, and after unearthing spent oyster and scallop shells, I started to recognize the music of a clamshell in my rake, whose teeth scraped across their rings like a Mexican guiro.

Locating the clams was one thing, but flipping them over into the rake and bringing them to the surface was another. I found it easier to walk softly, let my feet sink an inch into the mud, feel out clams, and dig them out with my toes. My companions — William Chadwick, home for the summer from North Carolina State University, and oyster farmers CJ Lemay and Rod Mason — indulged my technique. They had their own. Mason, who grew up on Ocracoke Island, remembers greasing his dog up with vegetable oil and bringing her clamming. The oil would form a slick on the surface of the water, through which clammers could see to the shallow bottom. It’s what you did if you had bills to pay and clam orders to fill.

For generations, Carteret County has measured time by its commercial harvest. Mullet roil the waters in fall. When yellow butterflies appear toward the end of September, you know that spot are running. In the winter, folks collect oysters. Whelks emerge in early spring. Fifty years ago, families dug for clams late spring through the summer, selling their haul to clam and fish houses and keeping some for supper.

Clam aquaculture is not entirely welcome Down East, an area of  North Carolina east of the town of Beaufort, where marsh and sky and water meet at sea level and the Confederate flag still flaps from trucks running down the beach. An outsider, known Down East as a dingbatter, tried to bring in clam farming in the early ’90s. He quickly found that locals, who saw the sea as their birthright, had no interest in having the bottom of Core Sound privatized. Commercial fishermen, who had grown accustomed to fighting for their right to make a living, successfully petitioned a moratorium on new aquaculture leases.

Emma Rose Guthrie, affectionately known as Emmer, hails from a near eternal line of commercial fishermen. Her great-great-grandaddy harpooned whales as they passed the Outer Banks. Her people migrated across Core Sound from Shackleford Banks to Harkers Island after the hurricane of 1933 — the year of her birth and the same storm that lashed Hog Island on the Eastern Shore. The torrent permanently split Cape Lookout and Shackleford, once a single island, into two.

Guthrie remembers the first boat her daddy took her clamming on, the wind-powered Bonnie, a vessel he built himself and a model of which she displays in her dining room. “Every time Daddy went in the boat, I was waiting for him,” she says. Guthrie worked side by side with her husband as a commercial fisherwoman — running shrimp down to McClellanville, South Carolina, and setting 500 feet worth of flounder net in spring and fall — all while raising three children and pulling shifts in fish houses and restaurant kitchens. She grabbed my hand and with the other pointed to age spots on her own tanned and deeply lined arm, her barnacles, she said, laughing.

Guthrie, 91, wanted to take me clamming, but her daughters vetoed it because of a recent health scare. Instead she showed me her rake collection, all lined up on her front porch with different tines and baskets for different substrates and seasons. Guthrie knows how to sign clams, too. In dry white sand, when the sun is coming up, you can see clams spit, she says. When it’s hot, they crawl through the sand and leave a telltale lump. As the tide starts coming in, clams spit under the water, which forms a keyhole-shaped indentation in the sand.

Guthrie is one of 14 children, and this knowledge kept her family fed. “My grandma had this old four-legged pot, and every day she’d throw something in that pot. Whether it was clams or oyster stew or scallop stew or collard greens or dried beans,” she says. “There was a lot of us, but we never went without.”

There’s just one grocery store on Harkers Island, opened in 1960, whose motto is: “If Billy’s doesn’t have it you can probably do without!” It feels like the island’s unofficial slogan, too, and a throughline for its unpretentious cooking. There’s a pantheon of Outer Banks dishes that start and end with seafood, potato, water, onion, and cornmeal dumplings — Down East clam chowder among them. Guthrie prides herself on her clam chowder. So does Leona Willis, 87.

“My grandmother makes the best clam chowder in the world,” Donovan Willis told me as we stood talking in his kitchen. Mrs. Leona isn’t much for interviews or for fully revealing her chowder secrets, even to her grandchildren. But Willis has observed her faithfully over the years, learning how to form thin cornmeal dumplings, which he indents at their center so they cook evenly. He brought his own chowder pot to last year’s Core Sound Chow Down chowder and stew competition. He’s vying to win in 2024.

Fisherman Ed Atkins and Caroline Hatchett rake for clams in the marsh grass near St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

Willis departs from Mrs. Leona’s recipe in two sacrilegious ways: He thickens the broth with a few teaspoons of hushpuppy mix and uses canned clams (you can buy jumbo 54-ounce cans of clams at Billy’s). After Willis presented his version to Leona a few years back, she summoned him the next week with a chowder retort. “She dumped it in my bowl and said, ‘Try that,’” he recalls. “It would melt in your freakin’ mouth, it was so good. She told me, ‘You want to be the best, you got to prove it.’”

Dingbatters who want to try their hand at Down East chowder can find the recipe in Island Born and Bred, part community cookbook and part historical record, from the Harkers Island United Methodist Church. There’s also fried clams with gravy, clam fritters, stewed clams, clam casserole, and perhaps the South’s only distinct clambake.

Best anyone can remember, Elmer “Clam King” Willis introduced the clambake to Carteret County in the 1940s. Willis was a clam distributor, who sought out Mercenaria mercenaria up and down the East Coast and delivered them to Heinz as the exclusive supplier for the company’s clam chowder. He employed most of the town of Williston, and generations of women who, rasp and knife in hand, pried open monster chowders.

When Elmer’s daughter Nancy entered grade school, he threw a clambake to pay for her school’s cafeteria. Nancy shared a folder of news clippings from her father’s heyday, including pictures with three North Carolina governors who drove over from Raleigh for Willis’ clambakes.

Willis and volunteers would fill onion bags with littlenecks, a half chicken, potatoes (Irish and sweet), whole onions, and corn. They’d load the bag into industrial clam steamers and cook them en masse. The style of the clambake more closely resembles Cleveland’s tradition, which notably includes chicken, than a traditional New England-style bake that involves seaweed and fire pits and soft-shell steamers rather than hard clams. Willis spent a brief time in Cleveland while studying engineering and supplied the city’s clambakes for decades; it’s possible he cribbed the dish from the Midwest, but no one knows for sure.

Kathryn Chadwick remembers when churches, PTOs, marching bands, and all manner of civic organizations threw clambakes to raise money. But after Willis’ clam house shut down, and then the county’s fish and crab houses folded, there was nowhere near to steam them. Folks drove clambakes back and forth from B and J Seafood in New Bern, more than an hour away. In June, the Sea Level Cemetery Association threw the first clambake in years to fund beautification efforts for the dead and their living; tickets sold for $20 a head.

Nevertheless, summertime in Carteret County still means clambake season; it’s just usually a home-cooked affair, steamed in layers in a large canning or stock pot. Chadwick serves on the Carteret County Board of Education and owns an RV park, a marina, and Wild Will’s Revenge restaurant in Atlantic. After we rode in with our clam haul, Chadwick and her sister Leslie Daniels spread out a clambake before us at their restaurant. The sisters (née Smith) are some kind of cousins to Elmer Willis. Daniels put together the bake casually, in minutes, and steamed it while we were out on the water.

For cooking as long as they did, the clams were remarkably tender. The chicken and clam juices, plus a full pound of butter, had melded into a decadent coastal potlikker, and a pan of cornbread stood by to sop it all up. We sat on a screened-in porch, drank cold Blue Moon, and ate with our hands.

Ana Shellem did not inherit clamming. She chose it after leaving a career in acting and modeling and falling in love with a man who taught her how to harvest wild shellfish. Shellem moved from New York City to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and the ebb and flow of the tide enchanted her. She observed lunar cycles and the color of marsh grass and the way clams hid a few inches beneath spent oyster shells.

With that observed knowledge, she started Shell’em Seafood, a wild-harvest shellfish business, in 2016. Shellem took me out onto the water into the tidal creeks tucked behind Masonboro Island, and we clomped around the edges of the marsh. The mud nearly swallowed my boots whole. I raked and failed and raked and squealed as I uncovered a chowder or a littleneck, a delicious little organism that survived predation for years in the wild, mostly by staying still.

Clams are a miracle. One farmer told me that the survival rate for wild clams is 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent. Shellem and I found 70 of them in less than an hour; she had planned a light harvest day for us. Once, she committed to an order of 1,900 clams. She hadn’t found enough before the tides rose, so she had to swim the channels, feeling with her hands while blue crabs nipped at her fingers.

Shellem works exclusively with regional restaurants, and she harvests precisely the number of shellfish chefs order, not one clam or whelk more. Her business model won’t make her wealthy, but she hopes it will help preserve wild shellfish populations and a dying profession. In 2018, Hurricane Florence delivered literal hogwash from inland farms to the coast, resulting in a six-month ban on wild harvest, which she says forced most old-time clammers and oystermen in the area off the water for good.

Ana Shellem, owner of Shell’em Seafood, harvests wild clams for North Carolina chefs.

Shellem delivered our catch to Dean Neff’s Seabird in Wilmington. After I rinsed the mud off the bridge of my nose and hands and hair, I sat at Neff’s dining counter, sipping on a dirty martini and chatting. Neff, who grew up on the Georgia coast, loves to eat clams raw. Even chowders, he says, are tender before they touch heat, and he nestled raw chopped clams back in their shells with Anson Mills cane syrup, cilantro, sea beans, and ramps. I slurped the North Carolina-style ceviche down as I would an oyster. Neff makes a rotating pasta with whatever Shellem delivers, so I twirled strands of linguine strewn with clams and mussels and tulip snails. He also sent out clams Bienville, a riff on the classic New Orleans oyster preparation. Neff separated their soft bellies from the springier bits to enhance the contrast of textures and blanketed the meat in a creamy Pernod-laced sauce.

Maybe clams’ secondary status stems from chowders’ springier texture, maybe, suggests Neff. They’re also a pain in the ass to shuck. I can verify that. I ordered a clam knife after that dinner and failed to slip it between unyielding shells. Another night, I spent 45 minutes with a pocket knife, cursing and hacking open two dozen.

Neff breaks the seal on a clam from the back hinge using a thinner-style oyster knife. He holds the clam firmly in his palm so it’s “looking at you,” he says, and slides the knife from back to front and over the top to free the adductor muscle and keep the belly intact. But there are alternative methods. Stingrays flap their wings to uncover clams from the sand and then grind them in their stomachs, blowing out pulverized shell. Whelks, those carnivorous beasts, have such powerful suction that they pry the shells open, insert tubelike mouths, and digest the meat. Drum chomp aquaculture clams in their nets and slurp the mangled flesh through the nets’ holes. You can also place clams in the freezer for a few hours, then briefly run warm water over them in the sink, and their tight shells will ease open ever so slightly.

Jeff Massey opens clams in the microwave, mostly for quality control. He tossed a few in a styrofoam bowl, hit 30 seconds, and soon I heard the clams burst open and their juices hiss. I tossed a just-cooked, fresh-from-the-ocean morsel into my mouth and popped it against the roof of my mouth.

Massey runs Livingston’s Bulls Bay Seafood in McClellanville, a Spanish moss-draped town with shrimp boats docked on the waterfront and nary a condo in sight. Stop for lunch at T.W. Graham & Co. if you’re passing through and order a fried shrimp and clam plate. McClellanville is also, technically, where my hunt for Southern clam culture began. Where I first heard whispers of multigenerational clamming families and grannies who roast clams under burlap.

Last year, I spent a day on Cape Roman Harbor with Massey and his team as they harvested bags of market-ready Mercenaria mercenaria. South of Virginia, marine farmers load their clams into sturdy mesh bags that rest on the seafloor. Virginia’s colder climate means clams need to burrow deeper in the winter, but this far south they’re comfortable tucked under a light, muddy blanket. When it’s time to harvest, the men of Bulls Bay attach a hook to the bags and a winch hoists them up — a process that saves a tremendous amount of labor.

 Wild clams had once been plentiful here. Massey recalls the days of hydraulic dredge boats with high-powered jets that forced sediment and clams from the seafloor. His business partner, Pete Kornack, remembers dredge harvests plummeting from 280 bags a day to barely enough clams to pay for the gas. Dredging proponents say it turns over the sea bottom; Massey compares it to harvesting potatoes with a bulldozer.

Aquaculture more than satisfies volume, though; the Bulls Bay team can harvest 25,000 clams in an hour, and tourism in Charleston and the Lowcountry has built local demand.

Last year, Josh Eboch and Kendra Tidwell, owners of Barrier Island Oyster, bought out Charleston clam farmer Dave Belanger (aka Clammer Dave), who had developed a following among the city’s chefs over two decades. In addition to their own aquaculture, Barrier Island acts as distributor for other South Carolina clam growers, selling anywhere from 12,000 to 18,000 clams a week in peak summer season. “After eight years of growing oysters, I have come to the conclusion that it’s a lot harder to make a profit farming oysters than it is distributing clams,” says Eboch. “The thing about our clam volumes is, it’s pretty much steady all the time. Restaurants need 1,000 clams every week, so we couldn’t dial that back even if we wanted to.”

Still, there is no shrimp and grits equivalent for clams. I ate a delicious clam and rapini pizza at the Obstinate Daughter on Sullivan’s Island and just missed stuffies from Co-Hog, a New England-style, clam-themed food truck in Charleston. At The Quinte, the kitchen dances around the Lowcountry tradition of chilled Southern seafood with a dish of pickled clams nestled into a bed of whipped avocado. Clams, says The Quinte chef Jason Stanhope, are slowly finding their way into modern Southern cooking. His favorite way to eat clams (except raw) is to steam them alongside the Lowcountry boil accoutrements of smoked sausage and potatoes, plus white wine, butter, and herbs. “But I don’t know of any traditional Southern clam recipes,” says Stanhope. “Maybe it’s because oysters have always ruled the waters.”

It hasn’t always been that way. In Horry County, near the North Carolina state line, Carolyn Dillian excavated Indigenous middens with distinct layers of clam and oyster shells; the Wakama people gathered a single species for a period of time and then switched to the other. “What this suggests is that people really understood how the clam population needed to recover and that it required several seasons of recovery,” says Dillian, an archaeologist and associate dean at Coastal Carolina University. “They’re doing this 1,500 years ago. Coming back to that site, year after year after year, and harvesting different kinds of seafood.”

Dillian’s studies indicate that Indigenous harvesters collected basketfuls of clams, threw them on an open fire, pried out meat, and dried it further for preservation. Most of the clams in the Horry County middens were chowders, 10 to 20 years old, an age determined by the number of rings in their shells. Like trees, as a clam grows, it forms one to two rings per year, depending on climate. Those rings carry a record of the environmental conditions in which it lived — whether that clam was harvested 1,000 years ago or yesterday.

“We can compare one to one between the modern and the historic, because our faithful clam scribes are sitting quietly on the bottom, minding their own business and recording data as they breathe,” says Juli Harding, professor of Marine Science at Coastal Carolina.

Ed Atkins did not know the age of the clam I held in my hands. But he did know where we’d find it, and what paltry fee it would fetch if he were to sell it. I met Atkins at his bait shack on Lady’s Island, on land his father bought in 1957, just over the bridge from St. Helena.

Atkins is a descendent of the Gullah Geechee people, who, once emancipated from slavery, stayed put in the Lowcountry and its barrier islands. For Atkins, that identity means a certain way of walking through the world: observant, bound to nature, self-sufficient, and generous. “My mother and father, they claim that they didn’t have their education, but they was smart as shit,” he says. “But here’s the deal now — no matter how much money they made out of that river, they never let us know that we ain’t had nothing to worry about. We always had to work and help one another.”

Atkins works primarily as a bait fisherman. He also leases land from the state to harvest wild oysters. He started clamming in the late ’90s; elders taught him how to sign. But clamming never earned a real profit. Even now, he can only get 20 to 30 cents per chowder, prices determined by aquaculture outfits that trade in millions of clams, not bushels. Because he can harvest oysters year-round in South Carolina, he’d need at least 80 cents to $1 to make clamming worth his time.

Today, we’d comb marsh grass for clams. Atkins explained that the bivalves snuggle up to the grass, especially in areas where it’s the greenest. He pointed out a keyhole, dug, and promptly hit a clam — his heavy bull rake singing and scraping against the shell. Soon enough under his tutelage, I started to spot them nosing. Dead clams (aka mudders) lie flat as they would on a raw bar, but live clams position themselves vertically in the mud with their noses sticking up to the sky.

Atkins asked what I wanted to do with our clams, so I invited myself over for dinner. And that’s how I came to Atkins Bluff, an idyllic, palmetto-ringed peninsula jutting out into the marsh and purchased by his grandfather in the 1940s. Atkins’ family farmed the land before making their living from the water. Now, three homes, a boat, and the artifacts of a working life — trailers, lawn mowers, and sheds — occupy their inheritance.

Atkins found a roasting pan in the yard and instructed me to gather fallen palmetto fronds. We collected wood from a recently felled cherry tree to build a fire. Before they had running water, Atkins says, they would have waited for high tide to wash down the clams. I fetched a hose.

We dumped the clams into the pan, and Atkins doused them with Old Bay, whose cayenne rose up with the smoke and sent us both into choking fits. He covered the clams with soaked burlap, I hosed it down with more water, and we waited. Atkins said I’d know they were done when I could smell them, a hint of marsh mingling with steam. When he lifted the burlap, those chowders were wide open, as if in supplication. We pulled the pan from the fire and squatted next to it in the dirt. I dotted the clams with Louisiana hot sauce and plucked them from their shells.

The last time I had visited Crescent, Georgia — an unincorporated community in McIntosh County — I was probably 8. My parents would buckle my sister and me into a Pontiac Bonneville and drive to the coast for dinners at Pelican Point, a seafood restaurant overlooking the Sapelo River. Charlie Phillips inherited the restaurant, which he has since renamed the Fish Dock at Pelican Point, and a rambling marina from his father. On a quiet Tuesday lunch service, watermen ate at the bar, a couple split an obscenely large seafood platter, and my parents and I started a meal with a dozen bacon-and-tomato-topped clams.

Phillips is a reluctant restaurateur, semiretired pirate, commercial fisherman, clam farmer, and raconteur. “Clams support all of our bad habits,” says Phillips, who wears his silver hair in a ponytail and whose vice of choice is a new boat.

He grew up shrimping and spent a few decades on a 68-footer chasing fish wherever he pleased — until regulations, catch limits, and outlandish permit costs more or less docked him. Phillips had some business sense, though, and clams appealed to his inner number cruncher. The day I visited, a truck pulled up to take 6,000 of his Sapelo Sea Farms clams to Jacksonville. One of his workers brought in 2.25 million seed clams worth $20,000, which will take four to six months to grow from the size of a BB to a fingernail. After that, he’ll sort the little guys and plant them with 1,000 of their closest kin in a grow-out bag. It’s not exactly the stuff of Jimmy Buffet lyrics, but it has kept Phillips and his waterfront working. It’s also one of the few industries, he says, where he can be a businessman and an environmentalist.

Clams are filter feeders. They suck water into a siphon and extract a portion of their favorite phytoplankton. Clams then package the particles they don’t want to eat in a mucus membrane and eject it through a second siphon. This process performs a few important tasks in an ecosystem. First, filtering improves water clarity, which lets in more light and helps grasses to grow and robust habitats to form. Second, clams take nutrients from the top of the water column and deposit them on the seafloor. Other bottom-dwelling organisms then feast on this nutrient-dense pseudofeces. But there’s more! Clam shells, made of calcium carbonate, act as carbon storage mechanisms and help maintain water pH. And! Hard-shelled Mercenaria mercenaria are a foundation species, providing structure to an otherwise soft bottom and a hiding place for other creatures. And! Farmed clams take pressure off the wild population.

“NGOs love me,” says Phillips. “We’re providing jobs. We’re cleaning the water. We’re not polluting anything.”

Phillips is clear-eyed about climate change. Out on the boat, we passed the roots of an ancient tree jutting out of the marsh; an archaeologist told him they were 2,000 to 3,000 years old. Coastlines have shifted, retreated, and risen since the dawn of time. It’s just happening at a faster pace now, especially in the Southeast. A study published in the Journal of Climate found that sea level rise in the region is more than double the global average; from 2010 to 2022, waters rose 5 inches. Driving down Highway 17 to Crescent, I passed the gray carcasses of cedar and pine that had been killed by saltwater inundation.

Warmer weather also fuels more powerful hurricanes. For the past year, Phillips and Virginia farmers, too, have been selling clams to distributors in Cedar Key, a Florida clamming town whose 2023 crop was devastated by a combination of 95 F water temperatures and Category 3 Hurricane Idalia. To keep their orders filled, Florida clammers had to turn to their competitors. Aquaculture clams will not mitigate sea level rise or warming waters, but compared with a steak dinner or fried chicken bucket, clams have “a benign ecological footprint,” according to NOAA.

In late afternoon Phillips drove me in his airboat to Mud River, a mudflat where he’ll soon plant clams among a collection of oyster reefs. He spun us around in doughnuts. There’s a little pirate left in him yet. 

The next morning I boarded the ferry to Sapelo Island. The ferry’s windows were scratched, splashed with seawater, and backlit by the sun; through them, my blurred view looked as if Monet had painted the marsh.

(Top) John Fradella III and his crew harvest clams from his lease in the Gulf of Mexico. (Bottom) Hard-shell clams are processed on the docks of Livingston’s Bulls Bay Seafood in McClellanville, South Carolina.

Ira Gene Grovner, dressed in a neat striped polo and dad jeans, met me at the dock. Grovner captained the Sapelo ferry for 25 years before retiring. He is a ninth-generation islander, and his people have inhabited Sapelo since 1802, when a ship delivered a group of enslaved workers from Sierra Leone to the barrier island.

Grovner drove me to his home in Hog Hammock, the center of the island’s Gullah Geechee community. Ninety-eight percent of Sapelo is owned by the state of Georgia. Before that it belonged to tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds, whose mansion still hosts overnight visitors, and before that a succession of plantation owners, the Spanish, and native people who left behind a circular midden 255 feet in diameter and 20 feet high. Just last year, Sapelo residents sued the state to stop zoning laws that would allow larger houses on the island, a move they say would increase real estate taxes and force longtime residents off island for good.

Grovner comes from a long line of people who make do. He fishes and crabs and grows a big garden. I mentioned how much I love okra, and he produced a gift of canned okra and tomatoes. He hunts deer, alligator, wild boar, and feral cows left after Reynolds shut down the island’s dairy. He also loves to clam.

Grovner’s father and elders taught him how to wade into neck-deep water and feel clams at his feet. He and his friends would dive for them and see who could come up with the most in their hands, a game children from “the other side,” as Grovner refers to the mainland, might play with plastic pool toys. 

Sometimes they might get two 5-gallon buckets’ worth, other times they’d fill the hull of their boat to the brink of sinking. He typically clams in the summer and freezes them, shucked, in zip-top bags so he’s supplied in cooler months.

Stewing clams for breakfast is its own kind of love language — it’s labor served over a mess of grits. Grovner chopped shucked clams on top of a Tupperware lid while a few pieces of bacon sizzled in a pot. He added a touch of oil, sauteed half a chopped onion, and stirred in a few spoonfuls of flour. Stewed clams also go by clams and gravy, and I had found a recipe for them in The Ultimate Gullah Cookbook. I later spied them in newspaper archives in cities along the Southeastern coast: Florence, Myrtle Beach, Wilmington, Greensboro. Still, the dish has escaped the pantheon of Southern gravies.

Grovner slipped the clams into the pot, and they bubbled fiercely. He added cayenne, black pepper, Kitchen Bouquet for color, and a touch of water. He covered the pan and we waited, chatting, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, and Grovner’s three grandchildren watched us from their frames on the wall. Grovner says you can eat stewed clams on rice, too, but after 20 or so minutes, he ladled mine next to quick grits dotted with butter. The stew was decidedly homely and assertively clam-y. It’s a handshake dish for true clam devotees. I sprinkled on some hot sauce and scraped the plate clean.

Cedar Key still feels like Old Florida. Driving in on Highway 24, I was speeding through a pine and red cedar forest one minute, and the next I shot out over a Gulf of Mexico rife with mangroves. The town’s downtown streets are lined with modest clapboard cottages topped with tin roofs. Fishermen still eat mullet and grits for breakfast at Annie’s Cafe. The Christ Episcopal Church has an osprey nest on its steeple and a scallop shell in stained glass. There’s tourism, sure, but pickup trucks still outnumber golf carts.

That’s largely thanks to clams. “Around here, the only other thing to do is smoke crack or meth. You pick the lesser of the two evils,” joked Craig Parks, manager of B&E Seafood, one of around 18 clam distributors and 190 certified clam farmers in this town of 720 inhabitants.

For most of its modern history, Cedar Key was mullet country; it’s an oily, abundant fish that sustained Indigenous people and pioneering Floridians. Early explorers of the Gulf wrote about the water “agitating and boiling with fish darting from one side to another,” and until 30 years ago, Florida fishermen hauled in some 25 million pounds of striped mullet a year. But in 1994, the state Legislature banned gill net fishing and effectively put mullet fishermen out of business.

The effort was sponsored by the Coastal Conservation Association, which, despite its name, largely represents the interests of anglers and sport fishermen. “There was a lot of bitterness,” says Bobby Witt, a former mullet fisherman. 

Thirty years later, the ban still stings. But Witt — tan, trim, and photo-ready in a Cedar Key Clams ballcap — lives on the water in a houseboat that’s secreted away behind a thick patch of mangroves. He was the principal farmer for Cedar Key Aquaculture Farms for more than 25 years and has only recently cut back to farming a few of his own clam leases. His property includes a building with a long wooden sorting table; above it hangs a vintage sign that says: “Protect your right to enjoy fresh Florida seafood. Vote no on #3.”

Witt was among the first cohort of a state-led job retraining program that made mullet men into clammers. Women who sewed gill nets learned to make clam bags, a local innovation. Boatbuilders converted mullet boats, known as bird dogs, into clam boats outfitted with hydraulic winches. “Cedar Key became a hub of clam farming in less than a decade,” says Leslie Sturmer, a shellfish Extension specialist for the University of Florida, who led the retraining efforts.

Mercenaria mercenaria isn’t even native to the Gulf; that honor goes to Mercenaria campechiensis, a heat-hardy species that does not survive refrigeration. But Cedar Key had the right substrate, salinity, and workforce for hard clam aquaculture, which now generates $45 million in economic impact for the town.

Locals joined the industry early on. Mike Davis owned Cedar Key’s fish house and was one of the first aquaculture trainees. The Solanos, owners of Cedar Key Aquaculture Farms, are 14th-generation Floridians. Their forebears sailed to the New World with Ponce de Leon. John Fradella III came home after graduating from Florida State University to manage his family’s Fradella Farm; he and Sarah Solano married this year, uniting two of the town’s prominent clam families.

Cedar Key also attracted clammers of another sort. Jeff Schleede, co-owner of Cedar Key Seafood Distributors, grew up digging clams off Bellport, Long Island. In his office hangs a picture of his father getting handcuffed for selling untagged clams. He remembers a time when high school dropouts made as much as their teachers by wading out into Long Island Sound and scratching for clams. But then the clams dried up, and Schleede’s father sent him out to find more. They harvested clams in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Virginia. They dredged North Carolina and South Carolina. “We kicked it dry,” he says.

The Schleedes started importing clams from England but got a tip that the Indian River Sound in Florida held abundant, untapped clam beds. In 1982, his father told Schleede he could move to the Isle of Wight or Florida — with its palm trees and bikinis. Palm trees won, and the clam boom lasted five years. “We were 19-year-old kids, clam diggers. You come to Palm Bay and you can buy a little ranch house with a crappy little swimming pool in the back for $49,000. It was paradise.”

“You could say they raped it,” says Rory Cantwell, who made the same migration as Schleede and now owns Dog Island Blues Clam Company with his wife, Rose. “We took anything that wasn’t nailed down and sold it.”

When the New Yorkers learned about the budding aquaculture industry in Cedar Key, they stopped chasing clams. But the perennial warmth that attracted them to the state has been a blessing and a curse. Average water temperatures of 77 F guaranteed that Cedar Key clams grew faster than anywhere else in the country, then the water got hot-tub hot. Faster-growing clams also means Cedar Key farmers can sell their clams for less and still turn a profit, which helped them secure big national accounts like Costco. After Idalia, though, Virginia has taken over clam sales to the mega wholesale club.

The Cantwells lost all their crop in Idalia. They couldn’t get back to work — or into their home, which flooded — for seven months. To start generating revenue, they plan on harvesting young, ⅞-inch “pastas” that sell for $3 a bag. “A fast nickel is better than a slow dime,” Cantwell told me.

The industry might have imploded had it not been for government intervention. Rose Cantwell oversees a disaster relief program whose staffing agency, funded by the state, employs some 250 Cedar Key aquaculture workers. It pays them $30 an hour to grow and plant seed, as well as harvest and sort clams — wages that typically come from selling their harvest. But earlier this year farmers pulled more clamshell than live clams.

“We’ve been able to get together programs for financial relief, to get people replanting and recovering, so they can make their mortgage and the payments they need to keep living while they’re not harvesting anything,” says Sturmer. “It’s a resilient community. They hunker down, and they are optimistic about the next crop.”

The day I left Cedar Key, I found the only open bar seat at The Clam Bake, a restaurant in Fort Myers, and nursed a Narragansett. After nearly three weeks of hard-shell clam eating, I ordered a $38 basket of fried Ipswich clams — Mya arenaria, whole bellies, the soft-shell kind, flown in from some New England town. It pains me to say that if the South grew soft-shell clams, we might have raised more and better clam eaters. I can imagine them on a cookout plate next to hushpuppies and coleslaw or spilling out of an unwieldy po’ boy. Tender and sweet, those clams would holler hell yeah. 

 But it wasn’t meant to be. Mya arenaria don’t thrive south of Maryland, and the Chesapeake’s native soft-shell population never recovered after a 1972 tropical storm suffocated them with sediment. Critically, Maryland is the northern borderland for blue crabs, too, which feast on defenseless soft-shell clams and have prevented their rebound.

“Grit happens,” said Heather Lusk of H.M. Terry Co. in Virginia. Terry’s daughter and heir apparent was referring to the sand that clams ingest through their filters, and, to the consternation of cooks, occasionally manifests in the pot. But the triple entendre is a damn near perfect summation of the clam’s modern history in the South.

When oysters failed, there were clams. When a family of 14 needed to be fed, when commercial fishing regulations proved too onerous, when the mullet men were defeated by lobbyists, there were clams. Clams are our Plan B. They’re make-do — and that’s not something people take for granted in the Clam South. They’re the choices we make and how we proceed when grit happens.

But clams could be more — if not a bedrock of our cooking, then widely beloved. There are certainly enough growing in our waters. Clams remind me a bit of sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, and peanuts, those crops promoted by George Washington Carver to heal our soil in the wake of big cotton and to give Black sharecroppers a modicum of independence. Clams keep watermen and waterwomen working, which, in its own way, helps stave off coastal development. They also filter 40 gallons of seawater a day per adult clam. Remember how they extract phytoplankton and package it for bottom feeders? Clams do something similar for us. Phytoplankton are rich in vitamin B12, omega-3 fatty acids, and all nine amino acids. Clams do the work of gathering those nutrients from the ocean and deliver them to humans in a salty-sweet, iron-rich, gushing morsel.

Like those Carver crops, clams in Southern hands are an expression of identity and community. They’re a prayer for the people who feed us, the ocean that sustains us, and traditions we can’t bear to lose.

The manila folder on Mary Ellen Masters’ kitchen counter held nearly four decades of news clippings. I flipped through the thin newsprint and saw Masters, 81, progress from a mother with a head of chestnut-brown hair to a silver matriarch, a great-grandmother. All those years, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, she ladled bowls of Minorcan clam chowder for visitors to the St. Ambrose Spring Fair in Elkton, Florida, right outside St. Augustine.

Sunset over the mangroves in Cedar Key, Florida.

Masters lives in southern St. Johns County on Pellicer Creek, a tidal waterway named for her maternal grandmother’s people. She and her husband, Larry, are descended from the Minorcans, a group of indentured servants selected for their self-sufficiency, gathered from around the Mediterranean, and staged on the Spanish island of Minorca. In 1768, 1,400 members of this ethnically disparate group were sent to New Smyma to farm indigo, but after nine years of laboring in harsh conditions, they decamped with a priest to St. Augustine, where the Spanish governor granted them land and freedom.

In time, a hybrid Mediterranean-Southern cuisine emerged. Minorcans serve pilau, a dish of rice and cooked meat. “Anything can be pilaued,” says Masters: pork ribs, sausage, chicken, venison. They fry shrimp and fish. They grow hot-floral-sweet datil peppers, the foundational flavor of Minorcan cooking. They also relished gopher stew. Not the furry kind of gopher, mind you, but the tortoise that burrows into the sandy soil where blackjack oaks and longleaf pines grow. As a practicing Catholic, Masters’ mother prepared it for her six children nearly every Friday; since gopher is coldblooded, it did not count as meat.

Starting in 1883, tomato-based, datil-laced gopher stew was the star of the St. Ambrose Spring Fair. But a century later, with most of its habitat lost to clearcutting and housing tracts, the gopher harvest ceased. “All of a sudden somebody decided gophers were getting scarce and put them on the endangered species list. Now you can’t legally have a gopher,” says Masters. “Thirty-five or 40 years ago, we had chicken pilau and other Minorcan dishes at the fair, but interest had been slacking off a little bit. I thought, maybe I’ll try a pot of clam chowder, because the seasonings are almost identical to the gopher stew.”

The first Year of the Clam, church members dug for the bivalves themselves and cooked a 15-gallon pot. In 2024, Masters led a crew of volunteers for three days to produce 185 gallons. Ingredients include but are not limited to 45 pounds of salt pork, 45 bell peppers, 25 celery stalks, 200 pounds of chopped onions, 250 pounds of diced and parboiled red potatoes, two cases of #10 can tomato purée, six cases of #10 can crushed tomatoes, a dozen cases of clam juice, and 185 pounds of chopped fresh clams. Chopped datil peppers go in last, and the Scoville rating on the batches ranges from mild to Minorcan spicy. Each year, around a thousand people form a line, in sun and rain, to purchase a quart.

I had to have some. So I booked a flight from New York to Jackonville and drove a harried hour south on I-95 and then to the edge of Faver-Dykes State Park. The Masterses greeted me, flanked by cabbage palm columns, on their wraparound front porch. Masters had frozen a small portion of chowder after the fair and had it simmering, thick as bolognese, when I arrived. That morning, she had spiked it with freshly harvested datil peppers.

The Masterses and I sat around their dining room table. We signed ourselves and said the blessing. In that cup of chowder, I could taste all three days of Masters’ work. The molecules of the vegetables had married into a synchronous bite, with datil peppers hitting the high notes and clams anchoring it all with their distinct chew. I had seconds, even though she had prepared a feast of fried flounder, baked cheese grits, corn bread, coleslaw, and an apple cobbler.

While his wife fussed over the fish, Larry pointed out a gopher tortoise walking down the driveway, a second munching on grasses nearby, and a third flinging sand into the air as it tidied up its burrow behind their pool. As we sipped sweet tea, Masters told me about summer weekends on Ormond Beach, where her father dug for clams; he died when she was 10. Larry bragged on his wife for felling elk in Wyoming. On a decorative tortoiseshell, he demonstrated how to butcher a gopher. He showed me his didgeridoo as I walked out the door, my hands full with gifts of datil pepper hot sauce and datil-spiked yellow mustard.

I promised to return for next year’s St. Ambrose Fair to help Masters cook and serve. She’ll be there in her apron, surrounded by family and friends, in an outbuilding dubbed by one of the parish priests the Chowder Chapel.  ◊

This story is featured in Issue No. 9