BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 3 



3 



DECREASE OF FISH I1V SQUAIflSCOT RIVEK, NEW HAMPSHIRE. OX 

 ACCOUNT OF REFUSE MATTER FRO Tl fiAS WORKS, 



By S. B. SWETT, M. ». 



"Paul may plant," &c, but there will be no increase, as long as the 

 refuse matter from gas works is allowed to flow into the streams. 



In the year 1839 I went to Exeter, N. H., on Squainscot River, which 

 is at the head of navigation, and had great sport in the next spring 

 angling for white perch and striped bass, during one tide having, 

 caught a bushel with rod and line ; the bait being young eels, of which 

 I could scoop up a pint at a time in the holes in the rocks under the 

 dam. After three or four years I found that there was great scarcity 

 of bait as well as perch, &c, except dead perch, of which there were a 

 a large quantity floating on the surface of the river at every tide. The 

 alewives began to appear in less quantities each year, and eels in the 

 winter became very scarce, so much so that from a barrel a day, which 

 for years had been an ordinary day's work for a man, a bushel was 

 rarely secured. In 1837-'38 bass were so plenty during the winter in 

 the river that they brought only one to three cents a pound, on the ice, 

 and several teams from Canada and the north loaded there with them 

 for a return freight at that price rather than go ten miles farther to the 

 sea for frozen codfish as they had intended. The first haul of alewives 

 made in the river in a seine amounted to 36 hogsheads, in the year 1818 

 or 1819, which is as many or far more than are secured now in an entire 

 summer. As the perch became more scarce, as well as the bait and all 

 other fish, I began to look for a cause, and found that the Exeter Cot- 

 ton Factory had a small gas-meter to make gas for the factory, and the 

 whole of the refuse was allowed to flow into the river, so that even 

 with any bait it was necessary to go some distance down stream below^ 

 the factory and the oily, tarry mass floating on the surface of the water 

 in that region, to take any fish, and then very few were caught and less 

 each year. After a few years a company started some gas works on the 

 river one-half mile below the factory to supply the town, and dug a 

 drain down into the river to discharge all their refuse thereby, and 

 since that it is difficult to obtain a mess ever so small of fresh fish in 

 the river within four or five miles of those works. Shad, bass, and oc- 

 casionally a salmon, and once in the year 1860 a sheepshead of 7 lbs., 

 were taken in the traps or weirs set for alewives ; but even the ale- 

 wife fishery is almost abandoned, and now not a dozeu small eels could 

 be secured under the dam where I could have secured a million in a day 

 from 1839 to 1850 or 1860. 



Boston, Mass., Jamaica Plain District, May 20, 1882. 



Bull. U. S. F. C. 82 3 Sept. 25, 1 882. 



