Long before the University of Maryland basektball team made the "Terps" a household name, and a century before the diamonback terrapin became Maryland's official state reptile in 1994, there was the Terrapin King of Crisfield, Md. -- from April 2005 issue of Chesapeake Bay Magazine

In 1887, Albert T. LaVallette Jr. of Philadelphia, armed with family money, a winning way and a Caribbean recipe for turtle soup, breezed into Crisfieold and, to the puzzlement of local watermen, began buying up all the diamondback terrapins he could find.

This was indeed odd behavior on the Eastern Shore, where terrapins had long been regarded as nuisances, unwelcome incidental catches, and hardly a culinary delicacy.  Indeed, terrapins still had the reputation from pre-emancipation days of being mere "slave food."  So it was little wonder that watermen were happy to sell their inadvertently caught terrapins to LaVallette at any price--not knowing, of course, that he was making an obscene profit by selling the turtle meat to high-end East Coast restaurants--where he himself had created a market for Maryland terrapin soup.

Perhaps they even reaped a small share of the profits as LaVallette amassed his fortune over the next two decades, built a waterfront home just outside Crisfield--and, yes,, contributed more than any other person to the decimation of the diamondback populatioon on the Eastern Shore. But, while the terrapin's decline at first seemed to have little effect on his business--no doubt because prices rose accordingly, and also perhaps because LaVallette was a master of what we now call "spin"--the bubble eventually burst.  By 1908, all that remained of LaVallette's turtle kingdom were the house he had built on Hammock Point and the empty terrapin pounds nearby...