He, his wife Lindsay, and young sons George and Braxton, as well as older children Lily, William, and Anne, are proud residents, but Tom is also an advocate for our town and a proud steward of the bay. He not only has put down roots but is dedicated to protecting our natural resources and improving the quality of life and the health of the bay. 

The pull of the bay and this special town was undeniable when he moved here with his family in 2013. Although Thornton grew up on a farm in North Central Illinois, he was drawn to the water of the North Shore and its similarity to the wide open spaces he had experienced as a child in the Midwest. So even though at age 9, he left his family farm to attend boarding school in historic Deerfield, Massachusetts, his heart and soul were always connected to farm life. While making a career shift that brought him to Long Island to do work with Northwell Health, he recalled time spent in the hamlet of Oyster Bay as a child.  As it turned out, his great-grandfather had been a military attaché to President Roosevelt, as well as first cousins with Edith Roosevelt, the First Lady. “Oyster Bay felt like home,” he explains, “and it was the perfect place to settle with my wife and young son George, who was just a baby in 2013.” When the family made the move, Tom felt a camaraderie for the baymen of Oyster Bay. Gathering shellfish from our bay, coves, and creeks is a timeless human endeavor and the baymen who continue that tradition today reflect our maritime heritage. It is a sensibility that deeply resonates with Tom. The more he learned about Oyster Bay, the more he wanted to get involved.

As an avid sailor, Tom explored the Bay and was drawn to life on, and in, the water. “Oyster Bay is iconic, and so is the bay. There is a whole industry that is living in the background that many don’t know about. There used to be so many baymen, and now there are few. The sad reality is that Oyster Bay is in environmental decline. I knew I wanted to do something to help.” The baymen, he explains, are the cornerstone of what has made Oyster Bay so iconic. “They are independent, resilient, hardworking, and trustworthy members of our community. We need to tell their story so that it isn’t just a story about an industry in decline, but about an optimistic outlook towards rebuilding, growth, and change.”

It is thanks to Tom’s background growing up on a farm in the Midwest, as well as his background in finance, venture capital, and investing in the healthcare industry, that he is so capable and well-placed to improve life here in Oyster Bay, as well as legislate and campaign for real and sustainable environmental change. As a board member of Friends of the Bay,  executive board member of the Waterfront Center, and founder and manager of the Oyster Bay Shellfish Company, Tom is well placed to enact change. He approaches this task as a three-part effort. First, he says, is recognition of the bay and the baymen as a critical part of our heritage and economy, as well as the very fabric of our community. Second, he says, is awareness of the fragility of our bay and ecosystem. The third step is action; working with town leaders from, and this is key, a “perspective of optimism”, to enact real sustainable and long-lasting change that will benefit the community economically, ecologically, and socially. “We must do good for our community by doing well,” Tom says. That sentiment is something he has built his entire life upon; he is a man of ideas and action.

Sweeping change, the kind that Tom is committed to, takes time and resources, and one of the first initiatives to get there is by recognizing the baymen who have come before. Tom is also a member of the Baymens Heritage Association, an organization that aims to educate about our shellfishing history and preserve and conserve the traditions that made Oyster Bay great. Tom is proud of the work this organization does and speaks lovingly of a monument that is being planned for Theodore Roosevelt Park of a life-size bayman cast in bronze pulling his catch of shellfish onto his boat. Funds are being raised to remember and honor the generations of fishermen who harvested our treasured resources and you can visit baymensheritage.org to learn more. 

One of the greatest tragedies about the decline of our ecosystem is the disappearance of the very oysters for which our bay is named. Tom has an ambition to bring them back, even if it takes time and lots of planning. While there is no silver bullet that will solve the problem, Tom has a plan. First, the dredging of the bay needs to stop, he says, and going forward we need to set aside parcels for oyster growth sanctuaries, and adopt modern forms of aquaculture to repopulate the bay with oysters. By adopting aquaculture, our baymen can both continue hand harvesting and pivot into a new industry to earn a viable living while we work to heal the bay and make it hospitable to oysters again.

Projects like what Tom proposes have been initiated and have enjoyed tremendous success in places like the Chesapeake Bay, Florida, Maine, Washington State, and even in the Great South Bay. In these places, and hopefully, soon in Oyster Bay, millions of oysters have been grown from seed in sanctuaries. The oysters grow and they naturally clean up the water. He also proposes, and this is wildly exciting, branding our oysters and trademarking them as “Oyster Bays”, similar to Blue Point Oysters, Kumamoto, or Shinnecocks. 

Tom and his family couldn’t imagine calling any place other than Oyster Bay home. “Every time I see my sons bolt outside barefoot to run on the beach or to explore the cove, I think to myself that this is truly the best place for kids to grow up. It’s such an idyllic place; it’s this small, safe community, stunningly beautiful, where kids can grow up connected to nature. We are so lucky to live here.” Oyster Bay is just as lucky to have Tom Thornton.