10/03/2026
Today on Super Cool Saturday: keep clam and dig on
Around the turn of the 20th century, the South End shoreline along lower Water Street and Flat Iron Point was a bustling commercial hub. The coast was lined with a dozen cedar-shingled clam shanties where a tight-knit, multi-generational community made its living.
During low tide, diggers worked the rich, vast mudflats of the Merrimack River and the Great Marsh. They brought their catch back to these huts, where local neighborhood women and families spent hours shucking, packing, and prepping the shellfish.
At the industry's absolute peak, local operations were a massive economic powerhouse, shipping between half a ton to five tons of fresh clams every single day by rail and truck straight to major metropolitan markets in Boston and New York City.
Industrial pollution and sewage upstream on the Merrimack caught up to the trade. Following nationwide health scares, authorities abruptly closed the Joppa beds in the mid-1920s, bringing sudden economic hardship to the neighborhood. To help save the local shellfish trade, the state stepped in and opened a dedicated Shellfish Purification Plant on Plum Island in 1928 to safely treat harvests.
Over the decades, storms and development cleared away the old shoreline, and today only a single original clam shanty still stands along the waterfront as a monument to this bygone maritime era.
This photo is from the CHMM collections.
