Oyster, Virginia

In November 2015, ESLAND sold its Oyster, Virginia location to Cherrystone Aqua-Farms and moved the historic Harvey building to Cape Charles Yacht Center. This has allowed Cherrystone Aqua-Farms to expand their nursery site and grow more clams and oysters. Cherrystone Aqua-Farms offer top-quality clams and oysters available in a variety of sizes and types and create more jobs on the Eastern Shore.

Cherrystone Aqua-Farms’ oysters and clams are raised in Virginia state-certified clean growing waters and are available year-round. They are raised in the same-salt-flushed waters as their wild counterparts so have the same great flavor. The oysters and clams are environmentally friendly, a sustainable food product and an excellent way to address non-point source pollution in our waterways.

The mission of ESLAND is to preserve, protect and revitalize the Eastern Shore and we consider the sale of our Oyster location a step forward in achieving this mission.

Moving Harvey

In 2015, ESLAND moved by barge the 1906 Harvey building from Oyster around the southern tip of the Eastern Shore to it’s new home on the Cape Charles harbor. This old building had served as a general store and private home before falling into disrepair. It was destined to be demolished before Eyre Baldwin and Chris Ashby discovered the buildings structure was still in tact featuring the solid contruction and materials that had preserved it for more than a century. It was carefully restored, then moved to the Cape Charles Yacht Center. It will soon serve as a restaurant, to be enjoyed by visitors for another 100 years. The video below details the move.

Today Harvey has been fully restored and repurposed, and is home to the Hook @ Harvey bistro at the Cape Charles Yacht Center.

Saving the Georgie E

The Georgie E was scattered like tornado debris across the lower Chesapeake Bay. The hull was gathering dust in a backyard boatyard near Urbanna, Virginia. The wheelhouse filled a barn on the Eastern Shore slowly succumbing to a guy who hated working on boats. The engine, well, who knew what parts were where. The 1930s wooden buy boat that Eyre Baldwin bought two years ago for no good reason was threatening to become his folly.

He knew he needed a different plan.

So in the dead of night with a fudging of some details and the reluctant escort of the Maryland Highway Patrol, he hauled the hull across the Bay Bridge at Annapolis and the cabin up the shore from Cheriton, and along with the engine deposited the lot at a scrappy boatyard in Cambridge, Maryland. He turned the patient over to Josh Wagner, an HVAC guy by day, well-known for rewiring classic antique cars—mostly Bentley’s, Rolls, Bugatti’s and such. His whacked-out resumé made him perfectly suited to pull together a dream team of sorts that took a classic down to its bones and built it back again.