A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



raged across Europe and America 



Peru nationalized its guano deposits 

 around 1 840 — running the guano business 

 as a state monopoly — and for the next 40 

 years earned most of its foreign exchange by 

 selling dried bird feces. During the middle of 

 the 19th century, the "guano gospel" spread 

 like wildfire. The use of commercial 

 fertilizers in general rose especially fast in 

 the American South, where soil exhaustion 

 was high, competition from Western lands 

 was intense and agricultural practices were 



relatively inefficient. By 1 854, 

 U.S. guano imports exceeded 

 175,000 tons a year, and by 1860, 

 guano represented 43 percent of 

 all commercial fertilizer used in 

 the United States. 



To procure cheaper sources 

 of guano, the U.S. Congress 

 passed the Guano Islands Act in 

 1855. Under this law, American 

 entrepreneurs could claim any 

 uninhabited island in the world if 

 it had the potential for guano 

 mining. Under the terms of the 

 Guano Islands Act, U.S. 

 investors eventually claimed 94 

 islands, rocks and keys, including 

 a tiny limestone crag between 

 Jamaica and Haiti known as 

 Navassa Island. 



The guano at Navassa Island 

 was not mainly bird excrement; 

 it was calcium phosphate and 

 limestone that had been produced 

 by the tectonic uplifting of coral 

 reefs. Though not competitive in 

 quality with Peruvian guanos, 

 Navassa Island's guano — as 

 it was known — was more 

 affordable. This was an espe- 

 cially important consideration 

 after the Civil War, when few 

 Southern farmers could afford the luxury 

 of Peruvian guano. 



A group of Wilmington businessmen 

 established the Navassa Guano Co. in 1869. 

 They hoped guano would be a good return 

 cargo for the seagoing vessels that carried 

 lumber and naval stores to the Caribbean. 

 To keep the guano's acrid smell out of 

 Wilmington, they built their factory a couple 

 of miles away on a marshy peninsula at the 

 confluence of the Brunswick and Cape Fear 

 rivers. Originally, the company imported 



phosphate rock from Navassa Island, 

 which soon grew famous for its abundance 

 of guano and infamous for its working 

 conditions, once deemed "above all known 

 types of punishment." These conditions 

 led to a notorious uprising by guano miners 

 in 1889 in which at least four overseers 

 were killed. 



Navassa Island was not mined after 

 1898, but the Navassa Guano Co. adjusted. 

 Guano, originally only bird droppings, 

 became synonymous with any kind of 

 manure. The Navassa company made 

 fertilizers with nitrate of soda from Peru, 

 potash (wood ash) from Germany, fish from 

 the Atlantic, phosphate rock and cottonseed 

 from other Southern states, and blood and 

 bone from Midwest slaughterhouses. By 

 1912, the company employed about 300 

 workers and produced 50,000 to 60,000 tons 

 of fertilizer a year. And the fertilizer industry, 

 led by the Navassa Guano Co., became the 

 most important in Wilmington. 



Today, Navassa is an incorporated town 

 of about 600 residents, most of them 

 African- Americans whose ancestors worked 

 in the guano industry. In the company's 

 earliest days "if you worked at the factory, 

 you could live in the former slaves' quarters 

 for free," according to Eulis Willis, a local 

 civic leader who wrote Ncnmsa: The Town 

 and Its People. Former slaves from local rice 

 plantations worked at Navassa, and a guano 

 boomtown materialized amid the old rice 

 fields and cypress swamps, with 15 houses, 

 two single men's quarters and two stores at a 

 site known as Bluff Hill. 



The town of Navassa grew up around 

 the Navassa Guano Co. "The factory was the 

 lifeblood of this community," Willis recalls. 

 Toward the end of the 19th century, the 

 guano workers began to buy their own land, 

 particularly along a small stream known as 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 21 



