FISHING TACKLE of all sorts, for use of either SEA or RIVER, made and sold by EDWARD POLE In Market-street.
The suspiciously surnamed Pole mentioned “Red cedar, hazel, dogwood fishing rods for fly, trolling and bottom fishing ⦠pocket reels ⦠best green or white hair, silk, hardest hempen, flaxen and cotton lines ⦠artificial flies, moths, and hackles ⦠the best kinds of fish hooks, of various sizes, made at Philadelphia.” All that notwithstanding, if you were specifically interested in shad, Edward Pole would sell you “seines ready made.”
There was, to be sure, a sport-fishing aspect in small readymade seines. For example, from 1732 onward the recreational gentlemen of the Colony in Schuylkillâa fishing-and-hunting clubâcaught shad in seines. Early on, they put them back, preferring, as food, salmon, perch, and rock fish (striped bass). Shad were only beginning to rise in status from the tables of the poor, and the members of the Colony in Schuylkill were not impecunious. They were golden flakes of the upper crust. They thought of themselves as a distinct political entity, the fourteenth-ranking colony, or possibly the first. Twenty-seven men in all, they cooked together and ate together what they killed and caught. They fished
in rowboats, which they called frigates. Their collective frigates were their “Navy.” They had their own Assembly, Governor, Sheriff, Coroner. They sometimes fished with rods twenty-five feet long. They used worms. The site of their first seat of government is beside Interstate 76 on the right bank of the Schuylkill in central Philadelphia. Before long they moved upstream to Lower Merion Township and the prime fishery of the Falls of Schuylkill. They pan-fried their perch, boiled their stripers and salmon, and eventually planked their shad. According to their first official history (published in 1889), they invented planked shad. On one of the Colony's outings in the seventeen-sixties-one of their “Publick fishing days”âthe club member who had been designated Caterer of the Day came in with an eight-pound shad. The Coroner said it had not died in a sporting way. He said he had seen the Caterer buy it at the corner of Front and Market. Moreover, the vendor who sold him the fish accused the Caterer of trying to pass off a pewter two-shilling piece. The Caterer instructed an Apprentice to cook the shad on live coals. Instead, the eye of the inventive Apprentice fell on an “old oaken rudder” hanging on a wall and he removed it and nailed the split shad to it, skin side down. He slathered the fish with oil and wine, added salt and pepper, and propped up the rudder at an angle near the fire. As in a reflector oven, the shad baked in radiant heat, its juices migrating this way and that as the rudder was inverted. The result was so savory and aromatic that word spread and people combed the city for rudders and centerboards on which to plank shad, all but dismantling the ships at the Delaware wharves. That is the official story. In the twenty-first century, every shad festival from the Rappahannock to the Connecticut still features planked shad, propped before beds of live coals. As a registered curmudgeon, I broil my daily shad for fifteen minutes and thirty seconds under gas, and never go to festivals.
In the Connecticut River valley, shad were once known as Gill
pork. It was a mean thing to say. It meant that people of Gill, Massachusetts, were so poor that they could not afford salt pork. They lacked “a competency”âthat is, in Webster's words, “property or means sufficient for the necessaries and conveniences of life: sufficiency without excess.” Gill is near Greenfield and Turners Falls, not far from New Hampshire, and the prejudice about shad seems to have faded north of Gill. But rifely downriver, in Connecticut and Massachusetts frontier towns, a sense of shame was set on the table with shad. In Hadley, near the present site of Holyoke Dam, a family about to sit down to dinner heard a knocking on the door and, before seeing who was there, hid a platter of shad under a bed. Churches had a practice called dignifying pews. The socially higher-ranking families got the better seats. Shad were plentiful, cost little or nothing, and were eaten by the poor. If you were known to eat shad, you got a bad pew. In his “History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts,” Sylvester Judd wrote, “It was discreditable for those who had a competency to eat shad; and it was disreputable to be destitute of salt pork, and the eating of shad implied a deficiency of pork.” Judd also said, “The story which has been handed down, that in former days, the fishermen took the salmon from the net, and often restored the shad to the stream, is not a fable.” The fact that Indians were known to eat shad further deepened the taint, not to mention the humble employment given shad by the parvenu whites of Plymouth. December 11, 1621, less than a year after the Plymouth landing, Edward Winslow wrote in a letter: “We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas; and, according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings, or rather shads, which we have in great abundance.” And in “New English Canaan, or New Canaan,” 1637, the trader Thomas Morton reported that shad were “taken
in such multitudes in every river ⦠that the inhabitants dung their ground with them.”
Even in Philadelphia, in William Penn's time, expensive places like the Blue Anchor, the Pewter Platter, and the State House Tavern served oceangoing turtles and migrating sturgeons, ignoring shad. Slowly, though, a change was taking place in the colonies, as the culinary appeal of the American shad overcame the inegalitarian attitudes of the American people. In 1683 in Massachusetts, the sawyer John Pynchon, a man of means, bartered a fishnet for packed shad that he could ship to market, and fifty additional shad for his family. Commercial seine-haul fisheries burgeoned not only in the Schuylkill, but the Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Hudsonâand even in New Jersey's Raritan River. There was a realty selling point in the spring migration. In the
Pennsylvania Gazette
for October 30, 1729, a New Jersey land tract of a thousand acres was presented for sale, eight miles upstream from Perth Amboy, about where the New Jersey Turnpike now crosses the river, “a good Landing ⦠excellent for taking of Shad at the Time of Year when they are in Season.” By 1736, barrelled Connecticut River shad were being advertised in Boston. In 1743, in the Connecticut River town of Northampton, Deacon Ebenezer Hunt recorded in an account book the fish's ultimate breakthrough in respectability: “Shad are very good, whether one has pork or not.” Fishermen tied rowboats to the rocks below the falls at South Hadley, and went after shad with scoop nets. They filled the boats to the tipping point, rowed them ashore, and rowed back to the rocks below the falls, their oar blades hitting shad. It was not uncommon, in a single day, for one man with a rowboat to bring back three thousand shad. As yet, almost no one cared for shad roe. The roe sacs were discarded. Or they were fed to pigs. Or they were given to the poor.
More than two hundred miles up the Delaware, in the early
seventeen-fifties, fishermen trapped shad with brush seines made of saplings that had leafed out. The saplings were tied together with pliant twigs, probably of willow. The brush seines were long enough to span the river.
At the mouth of the Hudson, netting was of course more advanced. The
Pennsylvania Gazette
printed this item in 1756 under the dateline New York, April 19: “The same day 5751 Shad were caught at one Draught, on the West Side of Long Island.”
New York
Journal
, April 26, 1770:
Last week a remarkable number of shad fish was taken at the Narrows, on Long Island. One of the seines, as it was drawn toward the shore, was so filled with fish, that the weight pressed it to the ground, whereby great numbers escaped. A second seine was then thrown out around the fish, a third around the second, and a fourth around the third ⦠The number of shad that were taken by the first net was three thousand; by the second, three thousand; by the third, four thousand; and by the fourth, fifteen hundred; in all, eleven thousand five hundred!
On August 4, 1773, a farm was offered for rent in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
:
⦠very pleasantly situated on Patowmack River, about five miles below Alexandria, and contains about 200 acres of cleared land, very good for grain of every kind, and tobacco; as also one of the largest and best springs on this side the Blue Ridge, within twenty yards of the door; it has a front upon the river of near a mile and an half, affording several good fishing landings; one of which only rented last spring, during the shad and herring season, for Twenty-five Pounds; to this belongs a well accustomed
Ferry, upon the most direct road leading from Annapolis through Colchester, Dumfries, and Fredericksburg to Williamsburg; on the premises are a dwelling house, with two brick chimnies and seven rooms, a kitchen, smokehouse, &c.
In block letters, the notice was signed, “WASHINGTON.”
Was George Washington, in 1773, so well known in Philadelphia that all he had to supply was his surname? Evidently so. To be sure, he was a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses. But, reader, can you name any state legislator who lives in your own county, let alone a Congressman from the Eighth District of Virginia? Washington had become essentially a farmer. After returning from the French and Indian Wars, aged twenty-six, he had resigned his commission in the army, had been married soon thereafter, and had dedicated his energy to the success of his plantation, about a hundred miles up the Potomac River from its mouth on the Chesapeake Bay. The plantation, Mount Vernon, was his principal occupation for the sixteen years that preceded the American Revolution. One of his biographers, the novelist Owen Wister, describes this period in Washington's life as “the longest parenthesis in the rush of his public existence.” To Washington, those years must have seemed less a parenthesis than a career.
He grew wheat and ground it in his mill. He grew corn. His cattle brand was GW. He rented his tobacco lands. His contiguous farms amounted to something more than eight thousand acres. He made boots and shoes. He wove wool plaid, barricum, striped silk, jump stripe, calico, broadcloth, and dimity. By 1769, his wheat milling was up to six thousand two hundred and forty-one bushels. He once said, in all modesty, that his flour was “equal, I believe, in quality to any made in this country.” His coopers made the barrels in which the flour was packed and shipped. The barrels were stencilled
“George Washington, Mount Vernon.” Much of it went out in his own schooner, which he built in 1765. He shipped shad to Antigua and elsewhere, presumably with his name on the barrels. The Mount Vernon distillery did not come along until his second term as President, when he signed an excise law that made the whiskey business particularly attractive. Meanwhile, through the pre-war years, he augmented the profits of Mount Vernon's imperfect farmland by exploiting its river fishery. In 1771, for example, he caught seven thousand seven hundred and sixty American shad and six hundred and seventy-nine thousand smaller herring. He dunged his ground with them.
He also marketed them, mainly in Alexandria, averaging, over the years, ten shillings per hundred shad. “This river ⦠is well supplied with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year,” he wrote, “and, in the spring, with the greatest profusion of shad, herrings, bass, carp, perch, sturgeon, &c. Several valuable fisheries appertain to the estate; the whole shore, in short, is one entire fishery.” In his diary he noted that “the white fish [i.e., shad] ran plentifully at my Sein landing having catch'd abt. 300 in one Hawl.” Always, he said, from the first catches of the spring migration he set aside “a sufficiency of fish for the use of my own people.” Evidently, his people desired more. They borrowed seines from him. Sunday, April 13, 1760: “My Negroes asked the lent of a Sein today, but caught little or no Fish.” The Potomac is a mile wide at Mount Vernon and the longest seines were drawn in circles far out on the river by boats, then hauled ashore either by hand or with a windlass turned by horses.
The American shad at Mount Vernon were passing through, or, in any case, intending to. Their spawning grounds were between Alexandria and Great Falls, inside and a little outside the modern Beltway. It was toward the end of the shad run of 1608 that Captain John Smith and fourteen others discovered the Potomac River. Sailing out of Jamestown, scouting the tidewater
country in what Smith described as “an open barge neare three tuns burthen,” they evidently got up at least as far as the site of Chain Bridge, which connects Arlington and the District of Columbia. The idea that “pristine” rivers teemed with lifeâthat precontact American rivers were so thick with fish that you could almost walk like Jesus Christ on their backsâis sometimes thought of as gross exaggeration, but Smith described fish “lying so thick with their heads aboue the water, as for want of nets (our barge driuing amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of vs euer seene in any place so swimming in the water.” When the frying pan failed him, Captain Smith leaned over the side and went after fish with another form of tackle. He wrote: “I amused myself by nailing them to the ground with my sword.”
Washington was a sport fisherman, too, but with a great deal less passion than he exhibited for hunting. He “went a dragging for Sturgeon” now and again. When he was in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, in mid-summer 1787, he went up the Schuylkill in a phaeton for a reminiscent day at Valley Forge, and fished there for trout. Three days later, he was up the Delaware, casting again. August 3, 1787: “I went up to Trenton on another Fishing party ⦠In the Evening fished, not very successfully.” August 4: “Fished again with more success (for perch) than yesterday.” As President, recuperating from an illness in 1790, when New York City was the capital of the United States, he went after striped bass and blackfish at Sandy Hook and caught plenty. But back in the pre-war Mount Vernon years, most of his journal entries that have to do with sport begin “Went a hunting ⦠Went a hunting ⦠Went a foxhunting.” July 25, 1772: “Went a fishing and dined at the Fish House at the Ferry Plantation.” December 3, 1772: “Went a Fox hunting ⦠and killd it after 3 hours chase.” In October 1770, on a canoe trip on the Ohio River, he used trotlines
to catch catfish. They were modest for the Ohio but in comparison with the Potomac were “of the size of our largest River Cats.” Back at Mount Vernon, though, fishing was business. April 10, 1771: “Began to Haul the Sein, tho few fish were catchd, and those of the Shad kind, owing to the coolness of the Weather.”