This is the fifth in a six-part, yearlong series called Disappearing Virginia in Distinction magazine. This story originally appeared in the October issue as “Prying a Living from the Water.”

There’s no mistaking a place tied to water, even in the stillness before dawn. The muddy scent of tidal flats blankets the land. The marsh grass whispers in the breeze as a low-slung shed spills light into the darkness. Inside, a group of laborers begins work on an age-old Chesapeake trade.

The crew stands shoulder to shoulder around a long stainless steel table, shucking oysters. This is an old guard, sustaining a link between this land and the water around it, a cultural connection that may soon slip from existence.

Many consider the Eastern oyster and blue crab to be delicacies of Virginia’s saltwater. They have survived exploitation and disease. But they’re demanding to process, and few locals are willing anymore to work with them on any appreciable scale.

These shellfish have always been an indelible part of Chesapeake culture, but the local love affair with them now goes only so far. The people who do the work of shucking and picking them are increasingly not from the area at all. Down the right back roads, though, there remain a couple pockets where this sea change has not yet swept over the workforce.

Clarence “Beaver” Marshall works through the process of shucking with muscle memory. The 81-year-old, aproned and gloved, uses a hammer and small block to break the oyster’s bill. With a dull blade he separates the opposing shells and sweeps under the meat, severing the connective muscle. He deposits the nugget of edible flesh into a stainless steel bucket.

The block and hammer he uses are remnants of the past. A common approach now is to stab the bivalves open with an oyster knife, or use mechanical separators, but purists prefer the approach at work here in Chincoteague. Fewer pieces of shell mix in with the flesh, so the meat remains intact.

Marshall began shucking for money in the 1950s when the work was one of the few good jobs a teenager could snag in the remote reaches of Tidewater. These days, in the busy season before Thanksgiving, a couple dozen people will stand around the table with him at Chincoteague Shellfish Farms, which processes oysters and clams for Ballard Fish & Oyster Co.

The work is hard. Out of the water, the soft, living part of an oyster shuts the shell tight with a powerful muscle. Even with tools, removing the edible flesh undamaged takes talent and long hours of practice. And shuckers are paid by salable volume.

By midmorning Marshall will have shucked hundreds of oysters. His record is 24 bushels – nearly 6,000 – in one shift. This is work he’s done all his life because he’s good at it and because consumers demand the food. But there’s no sentimentality, no outward reflection on the legacy of this vocation. “I’m just used to working,” he says.

The shuckers started at 4 a.m., a vestige of an age when they needed to be done with the workday before the heat presented risk of spoilage. The admonition to eat oysters only in a month that contains an “R” is a relic, too, of pre-refrigeration days. June, July and August are usually the warmest months. It’s also when oysters spawn, causing them to shed size. But farmed oysters, increasingly common in shucking houses, don’t lose girth. Operations like this are open year-round.

There were once 14 processing houses like this on this Chincoteague Island alone, according to Mike McGee, 73, a lifelong resident who has worked the water nearly all his life. There were also scores of crab picking houses around the Chesapeake, ready for watermen’s hauls. Hampton alone had 10 big plants that picked, packaged and shipped crabmeat around the United States.

Picking was traditionally women’s work. The blue crab has a tricky anatomy, its meat tucked tightly in numerous caverns throughout the thin inner shell. Removing the delicate white flesh required finesse, or so went the conventional wisdom. But it was tedious, and the camaraderie of sisterhood was a means of coping. Above the industrial din of motion and machinery, crab picking houses of the Chesapeake Bay often resonated with the rich melodies of African American women singing spirituals.

Commercial shucking and picking houses were local cornerstones, places where neighbors and families worked side by side, shared banal personal news and scandalous local gossip, and kept capital flowing through communities by their own need to make a living, tough and grimy as it was.

Life has gotten easier for most Americans. Few members of younger generations see an economic opportunity, much less a future, in this tiresome work. There are better prospects elsewhere. It’s the same story with the watermen who ply open water in deadrise workboats, McGee says. They’re aging out, thinning the workforce.

And so these processing facilities that have been given life by a native-born workforce, raised beside the same salt tide that sustains the seafood they’re processing, are becoming a rare species. Chincoteague Shellfish Farms is one of the few that still employ Virginians. Elsewhere, local dialects are being replaced by Spanish. Latin Americans are doing the work locals won’t, allowed in the United States temporarily on H-2B visas, which permit employers to hire foreign nationals for seasonal work.

That turn to foreign shores may be bringing the industry full circle: Immigrants helped fill the vast amount of unskilled labor needed to process the bounty of the bay a hundred years ago, although those workers were Europeans.

Cody Metcalf, general manager of Chincoteague Shellfish Farms, said he’ll resist using the foreign worker visas as long as he can. For the time being, locals like Marshall can keep production moving. But it’s only a matter of time. “It’s looking like in the future that’s the only way we’re going to be able to get labor for shucking,” he says.

Marshall guesses he’ll show up to shuck “until I get tired of it,” and that won’t be forever. He and McGee, and all the others who’ve watched the arc of the local seafood industry through the decades, know that change has been a constant in the long history of the crabs and oysters people devour.

Metcalf knows change is coming, but new blood won’t simply replace old. “I’m just not sure who’s going to fill their shoes,” he says.