Oysters are a Tallahassee tradition.

Leroy Milligan would know. He’s been in the oyster business for more than 50 years and can tell the difference between an oyster from Texas and from Apalachicola Bay.

The (farmed) Apalachicola oyster wins every time.

“The oysters still got the same taste,” he said. “The price of them? Of course that’s changed.”

Milligan, the owner of Shell Oyster Bar, remembers when a dozen oysters were $1 a dozen. Now, in some places around Tallahassee, a dozen on the half shell can cost $24.

But that doesn’t stop locals from buying the bivalves, even during months without an “R,” when historically raw oysters were thought to not be safe to eat because of the hotter temperatures.

They’re for parties, holidays and any special occasion, really.

“A true North Florida initiation rite is eating a raw oyster. It takes a certain steeliness to swallow something that looks like a glob of snot. But once you do, you may be hooked for life,” wrote Democrat writer Gerald Ensley in 2015.

Milligan is an expert when it comes to the salty sea delicacy, especially those from Florida. Ceday Key oysters are larger, but Apalachicola oysters are easier to shuck.

“You knock the top off that thing like there’s nothing to it,” he said.

Founded in the 1930s in a former gas station on South Monroe Street, Shell only sold raw oysters and small bottles of soda until 1992. When Shell moved to FAMU Way, Milligan added fried oysters, plus scallops, shrimp, grouper and other seafood to the menu.

“Such ‘dives’ draw legislators and lawyers, construction workers and college students, who sit elbow to elbow, slurping down the salty ‘pearlies’ in total conviviality,” wrote Ensley.

How to shuck an oyster

When Milligan first got into the oyster business, he said he wasn’t “very good” at shucking oysters.

Now, he’s a pro, even if he doesn’t eat oysters anymore (he guesses he just “got tired of them.”)

His instructions: “You just have to pop that shell, take a knife, go right along the top of it, and the shell will come right off.”

Milligan remembers when legislators used to buy them by the sack during session in the spring for large parties. Now, September through December, football season and the holidays, are the busiest months for oyster sales, said Matt McCreeless, general manager of Southern Seafood.

The most popular oysters are those out of the Gulf of Mexico, including from Texas and Louisiana, he said.

“Any time there’s an occasion to celebrate in this part of the country, oysters are very popular,” he said. “It’s kind of a cultural thing down here, it’s been like that for as long as I can remember.”

The collapse of the Apalachicola oyster

But life has been hard for the Apalachicola Bay oyster.

While people have been harvesting oysters from the bay since 1836, the oyster harvest plummeted by 99% from 2013 to 2019 after years of drought harmed the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin, which flows into the bay.

The waterway has been a point of contention between Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, which have argued in the Supreme Court over how the water should be allocated.

“Low freshwater flow from the ACF basin, coinciding with an extensive drought during 2010 throughmost of 2012, was most likely the tipping point for the oyster collapse,” according to a presentation by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission in 2020.

Farmed oysters are still available, but a five-year moratorium on harvesting wild oysters was implemented in 2020 to attempt to revive the delicate ecosystem that supports the oyster reefs. Apalachicola Bay should be open to harvesting oysters in the spring of 2026.

“If they open it,” Milligan said, warily. “They’re going to probably have to limit on what you can get.”

And then there’s the threat of exploratory drilling in Calhoun County at a well located between the Apalachicola River and the Chipola River.

As previously reported in April, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued a notice of intent to grant a permit for Clearwater Land & Minerals FLA to drill at the site. It’s sparked bipartisan criticism from state legislators, and opponents say the exploratory drilling could cause catastrophic environmental damage to the river and the floodplain and habitat that surrounds it.

But “they’re going to do what they want to do,” Milligan said. “It doesn’t make any difference what we say, it doesn’t seem to.”

This story is part of TLH 200: the Gerald Ensley Bicentennial Memorial Project. Throughout our city’s 200th birthday, we’ll be drawing on the Tallahassee Democrat columnist and historian’s research as we re-examine Tallahassee history. Read more at tallahassee.com/tlh200. Ana Goñi-Lessan can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Oysters, the Tallahassee way: History, hope and drilling, drought threat