Fish, Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 33 



CHAPTER V. 



The Decline of the Ritee Fisheries. 



The residents along the Schuylkill were not allowed a lengthy time in 

 which to enjoy their well-earned victory over the rack fishermen. 

 Other influences were at work which were to utterlj' ruin their fisheries. 

 On March 8, 1815, the Schuylkill Navigation Company was incorporated, 

 and that concern immediately began the erection of two huge dams 

 across the Schuylkill, one at Flatrock, now Shawmont, and the other at 

 Reading, and had them completed by the latter part of 1818. A few 

 years later the city of Philadelphia constructed a third dam at Fair- 

 mount for water supply purposes. As a result the migratory food fish- 

 eries above this last mentioned dam were immediately ruined. The 

 fishing below Fairmount was still good, however, for a few years, then 

 the gas works were built, and the refuse which was emptied into the 

 river drove the food fishes even from the still open part of the Schuyl- 

 kill. 



In the meantime so great was the feeling engendered among the peo- 

 ple against the Schuylkill Navigation Company for the part it took in 

 the destruction of the fisheries, as well as for other arbitrary acts, that 

 every opportunity was seized for reprisals. For a long time whenever a 

 suit for damages came before a court jury in which the company was 

 involved as defendant, it was pretty certain to be heavily mulcted. 



About the same time, also, the fisheries in the Lehigh river were de- 

 stroyed by a dam built near the point at which it discharges into the 

 Delaware. Almost contemporaneously with this a dam was built at 

 Lackawaxon, on the Delaware itself. Fortunately this, while it greatly 

 obstructed the passage of the shad to their spawning grounds, was yet 

 low enough to allow this fish to surmount the obstacle whenever the 

 water was high. Nevertheless, while this was the case, shad were 

 scarce above in the river after the erection of the Lackawaxon dam, as 

 compared to the years before it was built when the fish had free passage 

 to within thirty miles of the headwaters in New York State. 



At various times since the erection of the Lackawaxon dam e£forts 

 have been made by citizens of New Jersey to have built similar affairs 

 at other points, for water supply purposes, and acts to permit the 

 erection of such have, from time to time, been passed by the legislature 

 of that state. Fortunately these acts have all failed through the neces- 

 sary concurrent legislation in Pennsylvania. 



Worse than the dams, so far as fish life is concerned, were the . fish 

 3 



