Union Oyster House
Semicircular oyster bar in a colonial-era building, said to be where toothpicks were first popularized in America.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Boston's Union Oyster House opens with a strange question: why would a group of Harvard boys walk into this worn semicircular oyster bar night after night and loudly ask for a toothpick they did not need. It traces the answer back to Charles Forster, a Maine businessman who traveled to Brazil and noticed locals picking their teeth with slivers of wood, at a time when Americans were still stabbing at their gums with sharpened goose quills that snapped in the mouth. Forster built a machine to mass produce little wooden picks from white birch, then faced a harder problem than manufacturing them.
This audio guide was created using AI.