Brothers Thomas Lee, Tony, Ricky and Thomas Lee’s son, Lee will serve as captains of 65th annual Urbanna Oyster Festival
by Larry Chowning –
The Urbanna Oyster Festival Foundation (UOFF) has named brothers and fourth generation Urbanna commercial watermen Thomas Lee, Tony and Ricky Walton and Thomas Lee’s son, Lee, a fifth generation waterman, as captains of the 65th annual Urbanna Oyster Festival.
After the August storm of 1933, the Waltons’ grandfather and great-grandfather, Avery Payne, moved from Tangier Island with his family to the Town of Urbanna. He worked the water and operated Payne’s Crab House until his death in 1977. After his death, the brothers’ mother Catherine Via and aunt Beatrice (Payne) Taylor operated the crab house at the end of Virginia Street until it closed a few years ago.
As boys, Thomas Lee, Tony and Ricky worked with their grandfather and mother at the crab house and from them they learned the ways of the water and the seafood business.
Thomas Lee founded Walton Seafood and Tony started Tony Walton’s Seafood, both located just outside of Urbanna on Old Virginia Street Road. Ricky is an independent commercial waterman who oysters and crabs and Lee runs Walton Seafood with his father, Thomas Lee.
Heritage
When Avery Payne moved to Urbanna in 1933, his guardian and adopted father Henry Dize had already left Tangier and had established a home on Howard Street in town. Anecdotal town history has Dize as the first Urbanna waterman to harvest hard crabs using a crab pot. Trotline was the main gear form used here to harvest crabs until 1937 when Dize, who had seen the pots elsewhere, made some that were laced together with cotton twine and wire — no hog rings as they use today.
In a 1987 interview with Dize’s grandson, the late Ed Payne, said that Henry, who lived on Perkins Creek, would get up early and scull over to Buster Ferguson’s Seafood dock (on LaGrange Creek) and buy a box of fish for a dollar (for bait). “A box held a hundred pounds in it then. After he got his bait, he’d pole out into the river where he had 36 pots tied to wooden stakes. Granddaddy would come to a stake, tie his boat to it, pull her up, and empty her. He’d take his time. It wasn’t like we are today — going as hard as we can to catch as many crabs as we can,” said Ed.
“While Granddaddy was potting, Grandma each morning would run a little trotline in the creek to help out and they would ship their catch to Baltimore. A seafood truck would come to Urbanna each day to pick up crabs. In the early spring, they would get $7.50 a bushel for jimmies (large male crabs). That was good money back then. During the summertime, the price would get as low as $3 a bushel, and sometimes, they didn’t get enough to pay freight. Times were tight, but we kids didn’t know it. We were all happy-go-lucky and thought everything that shined was gold,” said Ed.
“The Walton and Payne family represents a long line of commercial watermen who have played a major role in the town’s oyster and seafood heritage,” said Pam Simon of the UOF.
This is the second time that Thomas Lee Walton has been named captain of the festival. He was so honored in 1989, while his mother and aunt, Catherine and Beatrice, received the honor in 1993.
