16 i'Ys/j, Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 



the town meeting held at Wilkes-Barre April 21, 1778, prices were 

 set on articles of sale, inter alia, as follows: Winter-fed beef, per pound. 

 Id. ; tobacco, per pound, 9rf. ; egg-s, per dozen, 8d ; shad apiece, &d. At 

 one time they brought but 4d. apiece. A bushel of salt would at one 

 time bring a hundred shad. 



At the time the dam was built they brought from 10 to 12 cents. On 

 the day of the big haul Mr. Harvey says they sold for a cent apiece 

 (Mr. Dana says 3 coppers). Mr. Isaac Osterhout remembers a Mr. 

 Walter Green, who gave twenty barrels of shad for a good Durham cow. 



Mr. Boberts says that in exchanging for maple sugar one good shad 

 was worth a pound of sugar ; when sold for cash shad were worth V2\ 

 cents apiece. Major Fassett says the market price of the shad was |6 

 per hundred. Dr. Horton says the shad, according to size, were worth 

 from 10 to 25 cents. 



Mr. HoUenback, in calculating the value of the fisheries near Wya- 

 lusing, has put the value of the shad at 10 cents apiece. In 1820 they 

 were held in Wilkes-Barre at $18.75 per hundred. Mr. Fowler says they 

 were worth 3 or 4 cents each. 



Every family along the river having any means whatever, had its half 

 barrel or more of shad salted away each season, and some smoked shad 

 hanging in their kitchen chimneys. But those living immediately along 

 the river were not the only beneficiaries of this magnificant food supply. 

 Its vastness and its cheapness was spread abroad throughout the com- 

 monwealth. Country folks from a radius of fifty miles came to the Sus- 

 quehanna to get their winter supply. Even the waters of the Delaware 

 seemed to yield an insignificant number as compared to the Susquehanna, 

 for people journeyed to the latter river from the New York State line on 

 the north, and from Easton on the east, at the junction of the Delaware 

 and the Lehigh rivers. Among the seekers for this splendid food fish 

 that joined this army were large numbers of residents from and about 

 Philadelphia. 



All these people, or a large portion of them camped on the river bank, 

 and they brought with them whatever they had of a marketable nature 

 in payment as well as to partial reimbursement for the journey. From 

 the New York line and Easton was brought maple sugar and salt; from 

 Milton, cider and whiskey and a mixture of the two which when im- 

 bibed, even in moderate quantities produced such a violent intoxication 

 that it was called "cider royal," and was analagous to a purely American 

 drink known as a "stone fence." The Quaker city folks brought leather, 

 iron and commodities of a like nature. 



Sometimes residents along the Susquehanna river took their surplus 

 catches of shad to distant markets without waiting for trade to come to 

 them. Mr. Isaac Osterhout, an aged gentleman, says he recollects well 

 when a boy about the year 1822 or 1823, he went with a neighbor to 

 Salina, New York, after salt, taking with them shad and whetstones 



