THE TERRAPIN INSTITUTE IS GRATEFUL TO THE AUTHOR AND THE CHESAPEAKE BAY
MAGAZINE FOR PERMISSION TO POST THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE. THIS ARTICLE
APPEARED IN THE APRIL 2005 ISSUE.

Easy Come, Easy Go
by Eugene L. Meyer

When diamondback terrapins thrived in the Bay, an enterprising man came to Crisfield and made a bundle
on turtle soup. Like most booms it went bust.

Long before the University of Maryland basketball team made the “Terps” a household name, and a century
before the diamondback terrapin become Maryland’s official state reptile in 1994, there was the Terrapin
King of Crisfield, Md. In 1887, Albert T. LaVallette Jr. of Philadelphia, armed with family money, a
winning way and a Caribbean recipe for turtle soup, breezed into Crisfield and, to the puzzlement of local
watermen, began buying up all the diamondback terrapins he could find.

This was indeed odd behavior on the Eastern Shore, where terrapins had long been regarded as nuisances,
unwelcome incidental catches, and hardly a culinary delicacy. Indeed, terrapins still had the reputation from
pre-emancipation days of being mere “slave food.” So it was little wonder that watermen were happy to sell
their inadvertently caught terrapins to LaVallette at any price—not knowing, of course, that he was making
an obscene profit by selling the turtle meat to high-end East Coast restaurants—where he himself had
created a market for Maryland terrapin soup. No doubt the watermen soon caught on. Perhaps they even
reaped a small share of the profits as LaVallette amassed his fortune over the next two decades, built a
waterfront home just outside Crisfield—and, yes, contributed more than any other person to the decimation
of the diamondback population on the Eastern Shore. But, while the terrapin’s decline at first seemed to
have little effect on his business—no doubt because prices rose accordingly, and also perhaps because
LaVallette was a master of what we now call “spin”—the bubble eventually burst. By 1908, all that
remained of LaVallette’s turtle kingdom were the house he had built on Hammock Point and the empty
terrapin pounds nearby.

I first learned of LaVallette and his exploits from Steve Liberatore, a Washington, D.C. stockbroker who
bought the LaVallette homestead in 1999. Liberatore was intrigued by the man whose fortune rose and fell
by the banks of Jenkins Creek, and I decided to see what I could find out.

In Crisfield, nobody seemed to know much. The J. Millard Tawes Museum contains displays on oystering,
crabbing, picking and packing. It chronicles Carvel Hall, the classic cutlery business that once thrived there.
It celebrates the famous Ward brothers and their fabulous decoys. But I found nothing about terrapins. In a
small pizza shop in town, I spotted a small painting of LaVallette’s home, which he had named “Ruthelie”
after two of his children. It was a detail on a mural depicting notable landmarks of Crisfield and Somerset
County, and the shop’s owner told me that she had a dinner bell of uncertain vintage from the house.

Digging into historical sources, I had no problem unearthing information about LaVallette’s ancestors,
dating all the way back to 16th century France. The family moved to Philadelphia in 1796. One ancestor,
Elie LaVallette II, who lived on a Severn River plantation near Annapolis, had been Register of Wills in
colonial Maryland. Another, Elie IV, a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, had once commanded “Old
Ironsides,” as the iconic U.S.S. Constitution was known; in fact, two 20th-century Navy destroyers, as well
as the seaside resort of Lavallette in New Jersey, were named after him. I tracked down Barbara Vallette,
the historian of the New Jersey-Philadelphia branch of the family, but she could shed no light on the
Terrapin King.

And then I hit pay dirt—a book by the late Crisfield historian Woodrow T. Wilson (no relation to the 28th
President) contained the names of LaVallette’s son and two daughters, including their married surnames and
their dates of birth and death. Eventually, with help from the 1930 census, I picked up the trail of daughter
Ruth LaVallette Bluhm, who had lived in Vienna, Md. That led to the widow of one of her sons in Elkton,
Md. She knew a little about my elusive quarry but said that her late husband’s sister, Elsie, knew more. I
reached Elsie Bluhm, now in her late 70s, at her home in Ocala, Fla. I must admit, her reaction to my
questions surprised me.

“Terrapin King, indeed!” said his sole surviving grandchild with a snort. “He left my grandma. He was a
cad.” LaVallette, it turns out, made a clean break of it when he left Crisfield. At about the same time his
terrapin business fell apart, he ran off with the family governess.

With the help of Elsie Bluhm and a wide assortment of historical sources, I was able to piece together
LaVallette’s story. In some places, we can only speculate, but one thing is for sure—Albert LaVallette was a
memorable character. He was the son of Albert Tallmadge LaVallette Sr., who was the son of the rear
admiral of “Old Ironsides” fame and the vice-president of the Barnegat Land Improvement Company. When
LaVallette Sr. laid out Lavallette, N.J., in 1877, he named the resort town in honor of his father. That same
year, he established a toehold in Maryland’s Somerset County, when he purchased oyster grounds on a
tributary of the Manokin River. The following year he and eight others—a mixture of Philadelphians and
Somerset County locals—formed the Manokin River Oyster Company. The 1880 census for Dames Quarter
(a village on Monie Bay, a northeast arm of Tangier Sound) includes LaVallette Sr. (occupation:
Gentleman), his wife Sarah and their six children, including Albert Jr., 16.

From 1880 to 1882, Albert Jr. was attending prep school in Pennsylvania, although he earned no degree.
For at least two years thereafter, he worked as a schooner pilot “in coastal waters.” Then, in March 1887, he
married Amy K. Ricketts—born in England, she had grown up in Philadelphia, where she had known Albert
nearly all her life. The couple then moved to Crisfield in southern Somerset County, where they had three
children: Amy in 1888, Elie in 1893 and Ruth in 1896.

Crisfield was already booming when LaVallette and his new wife moved there. The arrival of the railroad in
1867, bringing with it fast, refrigerated shipping to big East Coast cities, had opened up a huge market for
crabs and oysters. And LaVallette’s father—with his social and business connections in Philadelphia and
Somerset County, and his stake in Eastern Shore oysters—had already paved the way for his son to
participate in the seafood boom. But it was the diamondback terrapin—a turtle that thrived in the shallow
brackish water of the marsh-hugged Eastern Shore—that attracted Albert Jr. He saw that, unlike crabs and
oysters, the terrapin was still a largely unexploited resource.

So what exactly was this resource that caught LaVallette’s interest? Of the seven subspecies of
diamondback terrapin, it was the northern diamondback that was ubiquitous in the Bay’s salt-marsh country.
Today, as then, this variety is found in coastal waters from Cape Cod down to Cape Hatteras, while the
other six sub-species occur as far south as Texas. The reclusive reptile gets its name from the scales on its
shell, which have deep, diamond-shaped growth rings. Females mature at 12 years, weigh about 7 pounds
and reach about 9 inches in length; males mature at 7 years old, weigh only a pound and are about two
thirds the length of the female. Fast swimmers with their webbed feet, they prey on fish, crabs and snails as
well as worms and plant roots. On May nights, the turtles mate in the water, and for two months afterward
the females move up marshy creeks and crawl to just above the high tide line, where they lay their eggs and
bury them in six-inch-deep sand nests; remarkably, a female can also store male sperm for up to four years
before she produces her eggs. Although she may lay up to 18 eggs, only about 1 to 3 percent of the eggs
hatch. Those that do hatch, an inch in length, make their way to the water in late summer or early fall. Until
the late 19th century, those hatchlings that made it to the water and got a little growth under their shells had
a pretty good chance of survival. Until, that is, a new predator came along—man.

According to Crisfield writer Glenn Lawson, LaVallette’s first structure on Hammock Point was a shanty,
where he established his operation by purchasing terrapins from passing watermen. It’s said that the
watermen at first thought LaVallette was mad, but it turned out he knew exactly what he was doing. Armed
with his recipe (it is now lost, but it probably included sherry and heavy cream and was undoubtedly
delicious), the savvy salesman cornered the market. First, he persuaded restaurants in Philadelphia to serve
the “exclusive” dish at high prices, and then he did the same thing in Baltimore and New York. Holding
agreements from the restaurants naming him as their sole terrapin supplier, he bought the diamondbacks for
a song, penned them up at Hammock Point, and fed them using crab waste from the picking plants in town.

When LaVallette settled in Crisfield in 1887, terrapins were abundant. In 1891, the first year for which data
are available, an estimated 89,000 pounds were harvested in Maryland. Yet, only two years later came a
pessimistic assessment. “This small but expensive animal fills such a prominent place among the luxuries
for which our State is famous,” said a report prepared for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, “. . . but its
occurrence in our waters is too irregular and infrequent to give it an established place among our resources.”
But since the demand was so strong, LaVallette just raised the prices as the supply dropped. In 1893,
LaVallette got as much as $180 for a dozen “full counts” (a full-count terrapin had an underbelly at least
seven inches long, and weighed three to six pounds), and in 1896 he boasted to the New York Times, “I
have controlled the entire supply of Chesapeake Bay diamondback terrapin for a good number of years.” His
biggest market was New York City, where, in 1896, the visit of Chinese statesman Li Hung-chang brought
LaVallette an order for $3,000 worth of terrapin; and a dinner at Delmonico’s, given in 1890 by financier
Jay Gould, brought him $4,700 for 28 barrels of turtle meat.

But, as with crabs, finfish and oysters, the depleting terrapin stock couldn’t be kept quiet forever, no matter
how well LaVallette could spin the truth. By 1897, the Maryland harvest was down to 7,266 pounds; by
1901 it had fallen to 1,583 pounds; and by 1904, nearly all the terrapins being passed off as Maryland
diamondbacks were coming from somewhere else. Smaller terrapin operations, LaVallette complained, were
supplying terrapins they had bought in the Carolinas and Texas, “trying to palm them off on buyers as the
genuine Chesapeake article.” Yet, throughout these years, LaVallette managed to get great press. In 1897,
the Baltimore Sun reported that he continued to have “an immense trade in terrapin” in Washington,
Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. The paper took note of his “handsome dwelling” on the south side
of town, securely fenced “so as to prevent the escape of the high-priced inmates” from his terrapin pound
across an arm of the adjacent small creek. In the winter, the paper reported, LaVallette’s 10,000 terrapins
lived in his basement, “kept dark and above freezing point, but not too warm.” And, in 1898, the Portrait
and Biographical Record of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, published in New York, noted that LaVallette
“is familiarly known as the ‘king terrapin’ dealer of the world.”

Even as the harvest numbers fell, LaVallette continued to insist that his own terrapins were Maryland
diamondbacks. Perhaps he was telling a half-truth. According to Wilson, in the early 1900s LaVallette
headed up the Maryland State Experimental Station for terrapin propagation at Lloyds in nearby Dorchester
County. It’s not such a reach to wonder if this wasn’t his way of supplementing his own stock with
diamondback eggs from other regions.

Whatever the case, with the market still clamoring for the reptiles, scarcity continued to have its upside. In
1906, terrapins brought $96 a dozen. “One may commit murder, steal a horse, or run away with another
man’s wife on the Eastern Shore and stand some show of coming clear,” observed the Washington Post in
November 1902, “but woe betide the hapless one who is caught poaching about the pounds, interfering with
the eggs or taking terrapin out of season, for he is as certain of punishment as the sun is to rise. These
pounds are jealously guarded night and day, for on the Eastern Shore terrapin is the most profitable crop
raised. In fact, a pound full of diamondbacks is as good as a gold mine any day.” Three years later, the same
newspaper reported, “Today terrapin are so scarce and costly that only kings and money kings at that can
afford to eat them.”

Meanwhile, throughout the 1890s, LaVallette had secured his position in Crisfield as a local man of means.
In February 1898, for example, he loaned the Crisfield Opera House Association $5,000, at 5.5 percent
interest. Although he was a relative newcomer, his wealth bought acceptance for him and his family, whose
social comings and goings were duly chronicled in the ���Local News” columns of the Crisfield Times.

There was, however, one member of the LaVallette household whose name never made the social columns.
It is unknown precisely when a young woman named May Bussey went to work for the LaVallettes as a
governess. Census records indicate she was born in Maryland in the early 1870s, making her perhaps 10
years younger than the Terrapin King.

“She was what you call the third party,” Elsie Bluhm told me.

On February 29, 1908, the Crisfield Times reported that Albert was “spending some days with his family at
Ruthelie,” raising the question of where he was the rest of the time. Then came this report in the April 11
edition: “Mrs. A.T. LaVallette and daughters Amy and Ruth left Tuesday evening for an extensive visit to
relatives and friends in Los Angeles, California.” The following August, the newspaper reported that “Mrs.
A.T. LaVallette and her daughter, who have enjoyed the summer in a bungalow on the Pacific, at Venice,
Calif., unique among American resorts, have returned to Los Angeles.” From then on, the LaVallettes were
no longer residents of Crisfield. By the 1910 census, Amy LaVallette was living with her mother in Long
Beach, California—and the Terrapin King and May Bussey were living in Wythe, near Hampton, Va.

It must have been quite a scandal in its time. Amy LaVallette filed for divorce in 1912 in Circuit Court in
Princess Anne, claiming that her husband had “abandoned and deserted” her in April 1908. He left her
“wholly destitute,” she claimed, while he still owned “a large amount of real and personal estate” in
Maryland and elsewhere. Sadly, she also claimed that he had rejected her repeated efforts at reconciliation.
Crisfield Times publisher Lorie Quinn signed an affidavit on Amy LaVallette’s behalf. Albert responded that
he had contributed “as far as he was able” to the support of his wife and children, but that he owed
“considerable money.” Ultimately, Amy LaVallette received alimony payments of $50 monthly for life and,
in 1913, title to Ruthelie. But she would never again live there.

Details of the Terrapin King’s later years remain sketchy. According to Elsie Bluhm, he and “Miss May,”
whom he married in 1915, lived comfortably on a houseboat—the Valletta—in Hampton, Va. During World
War I, at age 52, he served a remarkably brief 27-day stint in the U.S. Navy as an ensign; skippering his
own 15-ton fishing boat, he watched over security nets that were designed to prevent German submarines
from entering the Chesapeake Bay. A decade later, in the summer of 1927, he and May traveled to San
Francisco to visit the destroyer U.S.S. LaVallette (DD-315), which had been named in honor of his
grandfather. “Mr. and Mrs. Albert LaVallette, who live at Hampton, Va., came out for lunch on this ship,”
according to the ship’s official papers. “The visit to the ship was very pleasant to all that came in contact
with them as they were a delightful and interesting couple.”

The 1930 census found Albert still living with May aboard the houseboat in Wythe (now part of the city of
Hampton), and from time to time local papers reported on his activities. “LaVallette’s ‘quiet haven,’ ”
reported one, is “one of the landmarks of Hampton Roads.”

Another likened a visit with him to “a tale out of a book, for he had innumerable stories to recount, the
romance in which were enhanced by the museum-like character of his abode.” Yet another described him as
“at one time famous, locally at least, for his breeding of terrapins.”

LaVallette apparently also raised terrapins while living on the houseboat, but the Hurricane of 1933 wiped
out that operation. It would prove to be the beginning of the end for LaVallette. By May 1937, the one-time
Terrapin King was ill and broke. Suffering from an enlarged prostate, he entered the Veterans
Administration hospital in Kecoughtan, Va., and asked the government for $6 to pay for a hairbrush, razor
and blades, shaving cream, cigarettes, envelopes, matches, writing paper and stamps—items he claimed he
could not afford. Then, in July, he died from internal bleeding following what should have been a routine
diagnostic procedure. He had, his hospital file noted, “only thirteen cents” in “personal funds.” Nonetheless,
thanks to his service in the Navy, LaVallette was buried at Hampton National Military Cemetery, and the
Veterans Administration paid the burial cost of $37.44. His widow May and his son Elie attended the
graveside ceremony. When the American flag was presented to May, she gave it to Elie. Reporting on
LaVallette’s death, a local paper called him “perhaps the most picturesque character who has honored the
Peninsula with his residence,” while another observed that he “sought and found life as he wished it.” A
decade later, applying (unsuccessfully) for a pension, May wrote that she was homeless with no means of
support—her husband had left her destitute. All that remained of the Terrapin King was Ruthelie, the home
he had built in Crisfield.

Amy LaVallette sold Ruthelie for $600 in 1923, after which it changed hands several times. In the 1930s,
the Old Bay Amusement Park occupied part of the property. In 1989, a PBS movie entitled Jacob Have I
Loved, based on a Newbery-Award-winning children’s book about a girl growing up on the Chesapeake
Bay, was filmed at the house. By the time Steve Liberatore came to Crisfield in 1998 to look for investment
property, Ruthelie was vacant. When he saw the one-story house with its hip-and-gable roof and three
chimneys, he couldn’t resist it. He and his wife Ginny have since renovated it and use it as their weekend
retreat. Their collection of ceramic turtles covers the five fireplace mantels, and a turtle knocker adorns the
side door. The terrapin pound is still there, several dozen pilings arranged in a square in a pond behind the
property’s small Bay-front beach.

To the north, the new condos near the City Dock now dominate the Crisfield skyline. But the view south
across Jenkins Creek remains unspoiled. At night, when the moon illuminates the water and marsh, or early
in the morning when the workboats rumble past Hammock Point on the way to the crab pots, things actually
don’t look all that different from when the Terrapin King ruled.

Captions


Above: Undated family photographs show Ruthelie, the LaVallette family home outside Crisfield; and the
family sailing in LaValletta.

Preceding pages: A diamondback terrapin female rests on a sandy beach; and (inset) Albert LaVallette, the
“Terrapin King.”

Left and bottom right: Inch-long diamondback terrapin hatchlings.
Middle: Ruthelie as it looks today, with Crisfield in the background. Bottom left: Remains of the terrapin
pounds at Ruthelie.

Above: In an illustration from Harper’s Weekly in 1888 (subtitled “feeding and catching terrapin on a
Maryland ‘farm’ ”), a well-heeled woman feeds diamondbacks while terrapin hunters (inset) wade in the
shallows after their prey.


Sidebars

Bring ’Em Back Alive
When terrapin meat became “gourmet fare” in the late 19th century, the diamondback
population in the Bay took a major hit. Although
today there are undoubtedly more diamondbacks in the Bay than in the early 20th century, the actual
numbers are unclear due to a lack of solid data. Some field researchers and watermen say the
numbers are currently on the rise, while others insist there has been a decline in recent decades.
Current restrictions seem to be helping. In Maryland, it’s illegal to catch terrapins of any size or to tamper
with their eggs between May 1 and July 31. The rest of the year—although a license is
required—there is no limit to the number harvested, although terrapins under six inches long are off
limits. Beginning in 1999, Maryland also mandated the use of “turtle excluder” devices on non-
commercial crab pots. A rectangular strip that is fastened across the pot’s funnel-shaped opening, an
excluder blocks the passage of larger turtles while allowing most crabs to pass through. But humans
continue to cause the biggest problems for terrapins, including the widespread use of bulkheading and riprap
that block females trying to lay their eggs on land. Overharvesting may also continue to threaten the turtles.
Meanwhile, help for terrapins comes from many quarters. It certainly has not hurt that the diamondback
terrapin is Maryland’s state reptile, as well as the official mascot of the University of Maryland. A task
force established in April 2001 by then Governor Parris Glendening noted the importance of the reptile and
recommended that the state impose a moratorium on commercial harvesting until more data
became available. At that time, a terrapin-advocacy program was already under way in the state’s
Department of Natural Resources. It was started in 1998 by staff member Marguerite Whilden, who
introduced the reptile to countless adults and schoolchildren (unlike the aggressive snapping turtle, which is
found throughout the Bay watershed, a diamondback terrapin can be handled without fear of a painful nip
on the hand). But in 2003, in a wave of budget cutbacks by Governor Robert Ehrlich,
Whilden was laid off and the program ended. To carry on her work, Whilden then founded the nonprofit
Terrapin Institute, now located at the Discovery Village complex in Shady
Side, Md. One of its programs is to buy terrapins destined for the market,
measure and tag them, and then release them into the Bay (the going rate for a terrapin is about $6); in 2004,
she says, the institute bought and freed 1,200 of them. The institute also works to remove manmade hazards
to terrapins, protect eggs and hatchlings, and provide advice to waterfront-property owners on how they can
make their shorelines more terrapin-friendly. Although last year fewer than 700 pounds of terrapin were
reported as harvested, Whilden believes the actual amount may be significantly higher. “I don’t want just to
save the turtle,” she says. “I want the Bay to bubble over with them.” For more information on the Terrapin
Institute, call 410-370-9171 or visit www.terrapininstitute.org.
—E.L.M.

Go Terps
Why a Terp? Why not a duck? Or a crab? For years, University of Maryland teams have been called the
Terrapins. A statue of the mighty terrapin Testudo graces the College Park campus. Students wear “Fear the
Turtle” T-shirts and keep turtle dolls in their dorm rooms. Though Chesapeake blue crabs may be more
emblematic of Maryland nowadays, the diamondback terrapin (the official state reptile) remains the
unofficial state mascot. And Albert T. LaVallette Jr. is indirectly responsible. He established the lowly,
long-disdained turtle as a high-class dish for the East Coast elite, and since his base of operations was
Crisfield, the Somerset County town also became closely associated with the terrapin. As it happened,
Crisfield was also the birthplace, in 1889, of Harry Clifton (Curley) Byrd, who went on to study, play ball,
coach and eventually serve as president at the University of Maryland at College Park. It was during his
tenure that the campus newspaper was named the Diamondback in 1923, and 10 years later the university
adopted the terrapin as its mascot.
—E.L.M.