Apalachicola oyster harvest
— two long tongs and the morning the bay gives back.
Not only on a wall.
Apalachicola oyster harvest, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A wooden skiff, two scissoring poles, a low pile of shell on deck. The Apalachicola oyster tonger works the same way his grandfather did, standing braced at the rail. The bay closed in 2020 and crews lay restoration shell now instead. The picture remembers the harvest the way the town does, with the working light just after sunrise off the water. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Apalachicola Bay covers about 210 square miles between the Florida mainland and a chain of barrier islands, fed by the Apalachicola River and protected from the open Gulf of Mexico. The bay sits in Franklin County on the Panhandle, with the towns of Apalachicola and Eastpoint working its north shore. Until 2020 it produced about ninety percent of Florida's oysters and roughly ten percent of the United States supply, almost all of it hand-tonged from small wooden skiffs in water under fifteen feet deep.
Oyster reefs grew here because the Apalachicola River pushed enough freshwater into the bay to hold salinity in the band oysters need, around fifteen parts per thousand. The river drains 19,500 square miles across three states. Upstream water withdrawals on the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers and a run of dry years drove flow down, salinity up, and predators in. The 2012 season failed; the wild fishery closed in 2020 through at least 2025.
The traditional season ran October through June, the cool months when oysters carry the most meat. A tonger worked a pair of scissor-rigged wooden poles, often twelve to sixteen feet long, lifting clusters off the bottom and culling legal-size shells on a wooden board called a culling iron. A good day brought in fifteen to twenty bags. Restoration crews now lay roughly 600 acres of new shell base under a NOAA and Nature Conservancy program, the slow rebuild of a reef.
