Blackford. — The Shad Problem 9 



vided no impassable obstacle intervenes. Stevenson* says 

 that in the early part of the nineteenth century, the shad 

 ascended the Savannah River to Tallulah Falls, a distance 

 of 384 miles, instead of 209 as at present. In the James 

 River their former run was some 350 miles in length; 

 the fish going far beyond Lexington, and old deeds now 

 on record in Rockbridge and other mountain counties, 

 specify whether the right to take shad in the rivers run- 

 ning through farms passed with the land. The present 

 run of shad in the James ends with Boscher's Dam at 

 Richmond, 120 miles from the sea, and instead of the 

 fish being so plentiful as to be called "food for injuns 

 and niggers," it has become one of the most costly deli- 

 cacies of the table. Still more marked is the decrease in 

 the Susquehanna, in which the shad formerly ran to 

 Binghamton, 513 miles by watercourse from the sea, 

 whereas now they do not appear to pass beyond Clark's 

 Ferry, about 84 miles from the mouth of the river. In 

 twenty-three of the principal Atlantic coast rivers, ag- 

 gregating 8,113 miles in length, shad were formerly 

 found throughout 6,052 miles while they are now found 

 in only 4,107 miles; a decrease of nearly 2,000 miles. 

 Colonel Marshall McDonald, a former U. S. Commission- 

 er of Fish and Fisheries, stated that the shad catch from 

 the 250 miles of James River from which they are now 

 excluded, was far in excess of the total catch from that 

 stream at the time when he made the report (1880) ; and 

 much the same condition obtains in the other shad 

 streams of the Atlantic coast. 



I do not propose to burden you with a mass of statis- 

 tics, but a few figures will show the gravity of the con- 

 dition and may cast some light on the causes that have 

 produced it. According to Statistical Bulletin No. 339 

 of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, the catch of shad in 

 Virginia and Maryland in 1880 aggregated 6,946,379 



*The Restricted Inland Range of Shad Due to Artificial Obstruc- 

 tions and Its Effect on Natural Reproduction. By Charles H. Steven- 

 son, of the U. S. Fish Commission. Paper read before the National 

 Fishery Congress and published in the Bulletin of the U. S. Commis- 

 sion of Fish and Fisheries for 1897. 



