Turtle soup almost wiped out wild terrapin on the Mississippi Coast

Not all animal hibernations can be claimed by cold-weather states. Even on the tepid Mississippi Gulf Coast and in the Louisiana marshes, the Diamondback Terrapin takes a winter snooze.

Once, this indigenous turtle was so commonplace that the Coast maintained terrapin farms on its bays, sound and islands, raking in sales to big-city chefs who used the meat for expensive and sought-after turtle soup. Trains filled with wooden barrels of live Diamondbacks headed to Washington, New York, Chicago and elsewhere.

Beautiful soup, so rich and green,

Waiting in a hot tureen!

Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

When Lewis Carroll wrote this 1865 poem for his character, Mock Turtle in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” turtle soup was in American vogue. This carry-over from colonial tables was also a carryover from indigenous American eating habits. Turtles were aplenty back in those days, so much so that before it reached delicacy status it was common food for the enslaved.

By the early to mid-20th Century, turtle soup was a victim of its own popularity. Some species teetered on the brink of extinction. Diamondbacks and Harbor Terrapins were the preferred meat, but others, including sea turtles, were stirred into the pot. Even “mock turtle soup” made from veal, beef, sometimes muskrat, was disappearing from menus.

The subspecies found from the Florida Panhandle, across Alabama and this state and into southeast Louisiana is called the Mississippi Diamondback Terrapin.

All terrapin subspecies face significant natural and man-made threats to their survival from lost or altered habitat, harvesting in states that allow it and mortality from crab traps and fishing nets, according to the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs.

The designation “terrapin” is used for turtles that live near brackish waters, with the Diamondback named for the shape of its shell growth rings. If left to their own devices, they can live up to 40 years.

In Mississippi, the Diamondback is designated as a non-game species in need of management. But with a fishing license you can catch up to four Diamondbacks in one hunting season, which is every month except April, May and June. The bottom shell must be at least six inches.

In Louisiana, with a fishing license, you can capture as many as you want. When Alabama forbid hunting of turtles in 2012, it passed the law in part because the Asian demand for turtle meat has hunters moving from state to state where laws are most lax. Other states have varying regulations.

One 1925 article in this newspaper reported that, in one trip to the Louisiana marshes, Capt. Ernest Moran brought back 640, Paul and Charles Trochesset captured 142 and Camille Boney, 78. They received, in today’s dollars, about $26 a turtle.

An earlier 1902 news item reported Captains Baptiste Moran and J.C. DeLamarre captured 334 terrapin “which amounted to $300.” That’s more than $8,000 in today’s dollars.

Other news articles document the whopping profit from hunting terrapin or buying them from hunters to fill a farm with holding pens half submerged in water. Later, they were shipped live to the East and North, where the famous Chesapeake Bay and other terrapin species were already depleted. Aiken and Anderson are other local names associated with such farming.

One Mississippi family noted for terrapin processing actually advocated regulation. This bit about Ernest Moran was reported in the Times Picayune in January 1909:

“E. Moran of Biloxi, Miss., one of the largest shippers of terrapin in this section, brought the attention of the [Louisiana] Game Commission yesterday to the fact that Louisiana terrapin, considered a great delicacy in some of the leading restaurants, cafes and hotels of New York and other big cities of the country, would be exterminated within a few years unless some measures were made to protect them.

“According to Mr. Moran, it is the custom to ship scores of female terrapins, and as a consequence the supply is being rapidly exhausted, as they are shipped during the entire year, which gives them no chance to breed or hatch.”

Two world wars, a Depression and Prohibition, combined with over-harvesting, quieted the American penchant for genuine turtle soup. For awhile, mock turtle soup was in vogue.

Many Americans today can not stomach the thought of eating or preparing turtle anymore than they can dog, whale or horse meat. Not surprisingly, popular New Orleans restaurants serve it, but the Cajuns who fled Nova Scotia to Louisiana have a history of eating anything, first for survival, then tradition.

A distinct flavor of most turtle soups — mock or real — is sherry. That is likely why the Diamondback and other soup turtles were helped by the 1920-33 Prohibition Era when sherry was banned.

Even before that, over-harvesting brought them to near-extinction. Part of the local problem was that most turtle “farmers” did not breed their own stock but captured it in the wild, or bought it from terrapin trappers and fishermen.

One entrepreneur, H.J. Thurston, canned turtle soup to ship out, and some local seafood canneries added turtle meat to their product line.

Farms in Bay St. Louis, Biloxi’s Back Bay, on Deer Island and in Jackson County often housed 4,000 to 14,000 terrapin in pens.

The turtles were fed a cheap diet of chopped raw oysters, today an expensive delicacy but plentiful then. The older males, called counts, brought the most money, with the female heifers next and the smaller bulls last on the money line.

Farms tended to come and go with the hurricanes, with plenty of stories about rounding up thousands of loose turtles. 1893, 1901, 1906, 1909, 1915, 1916 and 1926 were stormy years for terrapin farms and natural habitats.

Also, Thurston’s turtle soup cannery in Bay St. Louis closed when he died in 1920 from the extended Spanish flu pandemic.

The depleted stock, high price, American changing tastes and regulations helped save the Diamondback and others from extinction, although they’ve never regained their numbers to those mega farm days.

Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.