50 F'ish, Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 



success. The fishways in the Lackawaxon dam, put in jointly by the 

 Pennsylvania and the New York commissioners, gave one hundred miles 

 more of the river to the shad, yielded that much more area for spawn- 

 ing purposes and enabled the people of the far upper valley to once 

 more enjoy a food fish of which they had long been deprived. 



To what extent the fish passed to the upper waters of the Delaware 

 is shown by the following extract from the report of Fish Protector 

 Snyder to the New York commission in 1891. He says: "Since the 

 building of the Lackawaxon dam, forty-five or fifty years ago, not a shad 

 was seen above the dam until the spring of 1890, after the fish-ways 

 were put in, which have proven a great success. 



"The Burrow's dam (in New York) is about seventy miles above 

 Lackawaxon dam. I was informed by reliable witnesses that last 

 spring there were vast numbers of shad below the apron of the dam and 

 that for many rods the water was a solid mass of fish. 



" On the east branch of the liver, last spring, the shad ran up to 

 within about thirty miles of the headwaters. 



"At Downsville (in New York) thirty -eight were caught at one haul 

 with a net made of coarse grain sacks." 



The great success in restoring the fisheries was not, however, confined 

 to the upper Delaware. It was quite as marked below Trenton, where 

 the largest and most valuable fisheries are. All the way from Trenton 

 to Cape Henlopen the fisheries, most of which are on the Jersey shore, 

 though owned principally by Pennsylvanians, became, by 1889, profit- 

 able, and by 1890 from $81,000 in 1873 they had reached in the aggre 

 gate to the splendid figures of half a million dollars. 



The increase, when the work of restoration was fairly begun, was so 

 marked that many of the fisherman became alarmed and their old com- 

 plaints was changed to expressions of fear, lest there would be such an 

 over ])roduction of shad that they would not be profitable. But the 

 facilities of modern transportation were so great that a market was 

 readily found for the surplus in distant cities, and to-day in the fish 

 markets of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago and other western cities the 

 signs, "Delaware River Shad," are witnesses to the returned fecundity 

 of the river and the value of refrigerator cars. 



