Eastport Walking Tour Stops 9-10​

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Stop #9 is the Friemels Oyster Packing Co.  B.A. Friemel's oyster packing company was located along Spa Creek at this site.  The company was established around 1870 and continued to operate in Eastport until 1933, when a flood destroyed the two-story, wood-frame building.  If you looked across the harbor in 1878, you might see as many as a dozen oyster houses that dotted that shoreline.  
The decade of the 1880's was the peak of the Chesapeake Bay oyster harvest, when more than 18 million bushels;s were dredged or tonged each year, shucked and packed here, then shipped all across the country.  Now, because of over harvesting, disease and shrinking habitat, there's only about one per cent of that number of oysters left in the Bay.

Stop #10 is Heller's Boatyard.  This is where Eastport's famed boat building industry began.  On this site in 1868, a German immigrant named Wilheld Heller began crafting fine wooden boasts and this soon becomes the largest boatyard on Spa Creek, serving both commercial fishing boats and pleasure crab.   After Heller died in 1969, his son Henry ram the yard.  Eventually traditional wooden workboats like skipjacks, buggies and puny schooners disappeared from the Chesapeake Bay.  When Henry died in 1936, the yard closed.  After World War II, entrepreneurs like Arnie Gay created modern marinas accommodating pleasure boaters and their new fiberglass sail and powerboats.