Oysters were counted into bushel baskets, consolidated into sacks or barrels, and wheeled on hand trucks through the alley way to be loaded into awaiting boxcars. The practice of floating oysters was banned around 1927 after an outbreak of typhoid fever was blamed on Delaware Bay oysters. Although the true source of the epidemic was later identified as milk from Chicago, shucking, the removal of oysters from their shells, had by then taken its place. An almost exclusively African American migrant workforce was imported from the Chesapeake Bay to work as shuckers in the packinghouses. These seasonal workers lived in deplorable conditions in company towns such as Shellpile and returned to their homes along the Chesapeake, though many workers and their families eventually settled permanently in the Bayshore Region.