The Brant Point Shellfish Hatchery, operated year-round by the Town of Nantucket since the summer of 2010, was fully renovated in 2016-2017 into a fully integrated municipal hatchery focused solely on enhancing and restoring local shellfish populations in Town waters, with full-time biologists raising bay scallops, oysters, quahogs, and other native shellfish species. Shellfishing on Nantucket reaches back thousands of years, as shell middens show Indigenous people harvested shellfish long before European settlers found the island inhabited by Wampanoag tribes in the 1600s. From 1800 to 1880, settlers harvested bay scallops first for bait and later for food using cal sailboats and dredges, while in the 1800s and 1900s quahogs were used as codfish bait for dory fishermen and later for human consumption, and by the mid-1800s soft shell clams and sea clams were the most popular shellfish to eat. In the 1930s the United States Coast Guard Boathouse was built, and in 1900 the Boathouse name was changed to the Nantucket Marine Laboratory and it was used for shellfish propagation. In the 1970s whelk became marketable for human consumption, and in the 1980s bay scallop landings peaked at 100,000 bushels, oyster aquaculture began, and the United States Coast Guard ceased operations at the Boathouse. The Town leased the Boathouse in 1993 and gained ownership in 2012; in 2009 it hired a biologist to establish a hatchery, create an aquaculture program, and focus on shellfish production and stock enhancement, then adopted a Shellfish Management Plan in 2012 and carried out a 2 million-dollar renovation in 2016. Nantucket's first oyster restoration project was implemented in 2017-2018, and by 2020 scallops were harvested seasonally in Madaket and Nantucket Harbors, oysters were farmed year-round in Nantucket Harbor, and commercial and recreational fisheries existed for quahogs, mussels, and whelks, while soft shell clams could be fished only recreationally.