The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  In article upon article and book after book, a shad fisherman given to riffling pages will be drawn to the Schuylkill River in the fourth spring of the American Revolution. The random quotations above are, respectively, from Mary Anne Hines, Gordon Marshall, and William Woys Weaver’s “The Larder Invaded: Reflections on Three Centuries of Philadelphia Food and Drink” (The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1987), David G. Martin’s “The Philadelphia Campaign: June 1777-July 1778” (Combined Books, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, 1993), and Harry Emerson Wildes’”Valley Forge” (Macmillan, New York, 1938).

  With respect to George Washington, it would not have been a leap of the imagination for him to anticipate the spring shad run and choose a campsite accordingly. He was a commercial shad fisherman. Moreover, he did not require Daniel Boone to tell him that the Schuylkill was a prime fishery. While another river might be half a mile wide, this one was small enough to string a net across and by 1777 had long been synonymous with shad. Not to mention other species. Even in 1704, there was an established “fishing Damm” in Lower Merion Township. The best Schuylkill fishing spots were before long in such demand that stiff fees were charged for one cast with a hoop net. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, notices like this one (February 27, 1766) were not uncommon: “TO BE LETT, a SHAD and Herring Fishery, near the mouth of Schuylkill.” In 1767, to ease farmers’ tensions during the spring migration and give the fish themselves half a chance to complete their mission, the legislature decreed that fishermen on opposite banks had to fish on alternate days and, right bank or left bank, could use only one seine per twenty-four hours per pool. In 1771, fishing was banned in the Schuylkill from Saturday sunset to Monday sunrise.

  The boats in use in fishing and freighting were pine, cedar, and chestnut canoes. William Penn observed a canoe hewn from a single poplar and carrying four tons of bricks. There were shallops piled high with hay, arks piled high with produce, and long anguilliform multipart rafts with steering oars bow and stern. These vessels, as noted, tended to “stroke” and disintegrate in the very places where shad congregate—the river’s shelving rapids. Rounding the great bend at Spring Mill (now known in Schuylkill Expressway traffic reports as the Conshohocken curve), boatmen moving downstream came into view of rapids they called falls, the beginnings of a twenty-four-foot drop in six miles—Spring Mill Fall, Rummel Fall, Mount Ararat Fall, and Great Falls, more commonly known as the Falls of Schuylkill, which have been drowned for nearly two centuries in a dammed pool in the city of Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Gazette, March 28, 1771:

  TO BE LETT, and entered upon the 15th day of April, THAT large and convenient TAVERN, where Mrs. CUMMINS now lives. The situation is one of the most pleasant in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, and being only five miles distant, and a good road, it has long been noted for a resort of the best company, when the weather would permit. It has the advantage of a Shad fishery at the door.

  The Pennsylvania Gazette was owned and edited by Benjamin Franklin, who knew a clean river when he drank from one. He first saw Philadelphia as it came into view from a boat on the Delaware he helped to row—on Sunday morning, October 6, 1723. He landed hungry and walked into town. He was seventeen years old. On Second Street, he bought three oversized rolls from a baker. He put one under each arm, and began to eat the other. It seems to have made him thirsty. “Then I turn’d and went down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my Roll all the Way, and coming round found myself again at Market Street Wharf, near the Boat I came in, to which I went for a Draught of the River Water.” In the mid-twentieth century, a pollution block at Philadelphia—actually, a thirty-mile anoxic sag—would stop absolutely the springtime runs of American shad. But this was not the twentieth century. The river bottom was clearly visible even fifteen feet down. And shad in uncountable numbers ran up the Delaware and the tributary Schuylkill.

  In July, 1748, a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette said that Preserve Brown was selling pickled shad by the barrel at the upper end of Water Street. On Second Street, Preserve’s son Preserve sold “Good Four penny Beer.” Both Preserves were buyers of oats. By 1748, when you sat down to high tea in Philadelphia you could almost count on being offered a plate of pickled shad. October 17, 1765:

  Some time in September last, was left at the House of George Gilbert, at the Sign of the Crooked Billet, near the Slip, in Vine Street, a Barrel of Salt Shad, branded on the Head Reuben Hains. The owner is desired to come and pay the Charges, and take the fish.

  John Kaighn, of Second Street, took an ad on October 31, 1771, to say that he was selling “silver watches, neat fowling pieces, and fine and coarse three thread laid seine twine. Also pickled shad.”

  Isaac Melcher, of Second Street, June 9, 1773:

  Genuine Madeira, Lisbon and Teneriffe WINE, by the Pipe or Quarter Cask; West India and Philadelphia RUM; best French Brandy; Holland Geneva; German Scythes, Cutting knives, Grass hooks and Whetstones; best Oil flints, genuine French Indigo; choice Bohea Tea; Burlington Pork; and Fresh Shad, in barrels.

  September 14, 1774:

  Choice Shad, in Barrels and Half Barrels are to be SOLD by William Milnor, in Water-street … They are exceeding fat, and are warranted sound and well cured; the great inconvenience that farmers and others, at a great distance from rivers, labour under in getting their supply of fish in the season, appearing obvious to the subscriber, he, in order to remedy this, erected a fishery on Patowmack river, in Maryland, where the shad are taken in cool clear water, three hundred miles from the sea, and salted down immediately out of the water, which renders them much better than when they are carried a great distance before they are cured … Country store-keepers taking ten barrels, or upwards, shall have a proper abatement.

  The Pennsylvania Gazette of January 4, 1775, reported “An Act to Prevent Frauds in the Packing and Preserving Shad.” The standard barrel volume was defined as thirty-one and a half gallons, “well packed and well secured, with a proper Quantity of Salt and Pickle, in tight Casks, made of good, sound, well seasoned White Oak Timber.”

  I am much indebted to the Library Company of Philadelphia for the use of its electronic archive of the Pennsylvania Gazette, also the bound volumes. Now at 1314 Locust Street, the Library Company of Philadelphia was the first public library in America. It was founded—as who would ever guess?—by Benjamin Franklin.

  William Penn visited his colony twice, for two years each time—1682-84, 1699-1701. Soon after his first arrival, he held a council with the Lenape and asked for fishing rights on the Schuylkill—so obvious was the abundance and importance of the fishery. In a pamphlet about Pennsylvania that Penn wrote in England in 1685 is a section called “Of the Produce of our Waters,” the produce of greatest importance being whales, sturgeon, and shad.

  Alloes, as they call them in France, the Jews Allice, and our Ignorants, Shads, are excellent Fish and of the Bigness of our largest Carp: They are so Plentiful, that Captain Smyth’s Overseer at the Skulkil, drew 600 and odd at one Draught; 300 is no wonder; 100 familiarly. They are excellent Pickled or Smokt’d, as well as boyld fresh: They are caught by nets only.

  Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to “buy for me a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines,” but shad would not have been her quarry. Shad fishing did not attract anglers in large numbers until well into the twentieth century. In 1776, a sport-fishing tackle shop did exist in Philadelphia, as this advertisement in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet attests:

  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 Schuylkill—a fishing-and-hunting club—caught 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”—the 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”—that 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 Hudson—and 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.