326 GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW OF THE FISHERIES. 



The trade rapidly grew into immense proportions. Just when it was at its zenith it is bard to say 

 probably about thirty years ago and it was then very profitable. The Fair Haven establish- 

 ments had branch houses in all the inland cities, as far as Chicago and Saint Louis, and it was 

 reported that the profits of a single house, from 1852 to 1856, amounted to $25,000 a year. Levi 

 Rowe & Co., alone, in 185C, are said to have employed twenty vessels, and one hundred openers, 

 and to have sold 150,000 gallons of oysters, while companion houses shipped from 1,000 to 1,500 

 bushels per day throughout the ^season. In 1857-'58, according to De Broca, from 200 to 250 

 schooners were employed in supplying the establishments of Connecticut from the Chesapeake and 

 Fair Haven, which alone, he says, made use of 2,000,000 bushels, but this undoubtedly was a large 

 exaggeration; one-half of that would certainly more than cover the facts. Half a dozen years later 

 the decline was very perceptible." 



SOUTHERN OYSTERS AT FAIR HAVEN. At Fair Haven in 1857 the oyster business was quite 

 extensive. About eighty schooners of 2,000 to 4,500 bushels capacity were mostly owned at this 

 place, and many additional vessels were chartered to bring oysters here. The capital invested was 

 about $1,000,000. Mr. Ingersoll continues : 



" With the growth of so extensive a business, in so confined a space, came the attendant evil 

 of too severe competition. About 1850, therefore, one or two Fair Haven men of energy conceived 

 the idea of taking their warehouses to the oysters, instead of bringing the mollusks so far to the 

 salesroom. They therefore opened branch houses in Baltimore. Others followed, and the names 

 of Maltby, Mallory, Hemingway, Rowe, and their confreres, long familiar in Connecticut, and 

 identified then as now with the oyster business on the Quinepiac, became equally well known along 

 the Chesapeake, and, through wide advertisements, over the whole country. All the great Balti- 

 more firms of old standing originated in Fair Haven, just as Wellfleet, an obscure village on Cape 

 Cod, supplied Portland, Boston, and Providence with its oystermen. The result was the same in 

 both cases; the home interests retrograded when metropolitan advantages began to be used in 

 competition, and at Fair Haven considerable and rapid changes in methods, as well as the results of 

 trade, have come about. 



"All of the foregoing remarks have applied to the imported Chesapeake oysters, which were 

 brought in the spriug, fattened on the sand bars in the harbor, and taken up in the autumn. Then, 

 as now, New Haven harbor had no competition in this branch of trade worth speaking of anywhere 

 else in the State; and it may be dismissed, so far as the whole of Long Island Sound is concerned, 

 with the remark that many or all of the old dealers continue to bring and plant southern oysters, 

 which they open in the fall and winter, but a good proportion confine themselves wholly to raising 

 and disposing of natives. 



" The Chesapeake oysters brought into this locality in 1879 amounted to about 450,000 bushels. 

 Those from the Rappahannock are the favorites for winter use, and are imported almost exclu- 

 sively; for planting purposes, however, Rappahannock oysters are undesirable, and those from 

 Fishing Bay, Saint Mary's, and Crisfield are preferred. But this may be wholly changed in a year 

 or two. 



"EARLY OYSTER CAMPAIGNS ON THE QUINEPIAC. The remainder of my history will apply to 

 the gathering, transplanting, and propagating of native oysters in the waters of Long Island 

 Sound, opposite New Haven. 



" It has already been mentioned that native beds existed within recent years, if they do not 

 now flourish, in every harbor westward of the Thames River, and that many of these old localities, 

 as Stony Creek, Branford, &c., still furnish large quantities of small oysters for the plantations. 

 None of these localities ever equaled, however, the importance of the Qninepiac and its tributaries 



