"A million herring in one night. . ." 



BY CARLA B BURGESS 



It has been said that the founda- 

 tions of Amsterdam were laid on 

 herring bones. A little digging in 

 coastal North Carolina history shows 

 that the community timbers there, too, 

 rest on the bony fish. 



"In the bygone days, it was essen- 

 tial that everyone have a barrel of her- 

 ring," says Phillip Cecil "Tee Wee" 

 Blount of Jamesville. "It depended on 

 how many you had in the family as to 

 how many herring you needed." 



Salt herring fed the masses, without 

 regard to class or wealth. The fish, 

 high in protein and calories, were a 

 cheap and abundant source of food 

 and a cog in the region's economic 

 wheel. 



"It was one of the few foods we 

 could get that was cheap," he says. 



In those days most of the herring 

 caught ended up on the table. Today 

 it's used mainly for fish bait and 

 animal feed. 



"We sold fish to anyone who would 

 buy them," says Murray Nixon, a com- 

 mercial fisherman in Edenton. He 

 recalls that he and his father would 

 count out 200 to 300 herring in a 

 "washed-out fertilizer bag" at $5 per 

 thousand. ' All the families would 

 come down to the river and buy their 

 fish for the year.' ' 



Nixon says his family kept two or 

 three barrels in a smokehouse for 

 their own use, each containing about 

 3,500 herring. The fish were preserved 

 in various ways — pickled, dried or 

 "corned," meaning cut and salted. 



Nixon said his father drove a mule 

 and cart down to the river to fish and 

 would send the animal to and from 

 the house throughout the day, the flat 

 bed laden with herring each trip. 



"I started out fishing with my father 

 and as the years progressed got my 



own rig,' ' says Nixon, whose youngest 

 son Ricky now heads up the fishery 

 operation. 



The fishing scene in and around 

 the Albemarle Sound is rich in history. 

 The further back one goes, the more 

 lively the picture. 



Reporter and adventurer Porte 

 Crayon, in an 1857 spring issue of 

 Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 

 describes the shores of the Chowan as 

 "teeming with life and activity." At 

 Colerain, "busy crowds composed of 

 whites, blacks and mules wage un- 

 ceasing war upon the shad and her- 

 ring," he wrote. 



The Belvidere Fishery, Crayon 

 wrote, was a protrusion of sheds and 

 buildings, toward which the fishing 

 boats would approach, the dotted cork 

 lines of their seines enclosing the 

 beach in a semicircle. 



He described the tremendous 

 hauls— sometimes negotiated by teams 

 of mules— which landed as "a wrig- 

 gling mass. . .ten or 15,000 voiceless 

 wretches, whose fluttering sounds like 

 a strong rushing wind among the 

 leaves ..." They were scarcely landed 

 before they were "beheaded, cleaned 

 and salted away' ' 



The annual herring run, crucial to 

 the wealth of the region, was "a sub- 

 ject of as general conversation and all- 

 absorbing interest to the inhabitants 

 as is the yearly overflow of the Nile to 

 the Egyptians,' ' Crayon wrote. 



A seine of that time— 2,700 yards 

 long and 24 feet deep— was laid upon 

 platforms on the sterns of two heavy 

 10-oared boats and could involve more 

 than two miles in aggregate length, 

 the reporter said. 



Commercial fishing in the 

 Albemarle region pre-dates Crayon's 

 account. 



The first fisheries on the Chowan 

 River date back to the early 1700s, 

 and seine fishing was reportedly tak- 

 ing place by 1765. Products of the 

 fishery were exported— the higher 

 grades of salted and pickled herring 

 to Portugal and Spain and lower 

 grades to the West Indies. 



A German immigrant, John Penrose 

 Hettrich, was credited with introduc- 

 ing "pound" nets — a stationary trap 

 of stakes and net — in the region after 

 coming here from fishing the Great 

 Lakes in 1869. 



The pound net afforded greater 

 hauls with less manpower. In 1890, 

 one pound-net fisherman reportedly 

 caught a million herring in one night. 



Even further back, herring are 

 prominent in the history of the 

 early colonial settlements. Herring 

 and other abundant fish were used as 

 money and bartered for sugar, spirits, 

 coffee and other goods. 



When asking about the heyday of 

 the herring, one may hear references 

 to the rivers running black with her- 

 ring and to the flipping and splashing 

 of the silvery fish along the shoreline 

 during spawning. 

 The fishery in Chowan County was 



