Pogies for Profit

While they've seldom been directly eaten by people, pogies (menhaden) have furthered human welfare in the food chain of nearly all the other fish that we harvest in New England, and as a prime source of agricultural fertilizer since pre-colonial days when Native Americans used them to enrich the soil in their hills of corn.

Horse turning capstan to tighten the menhaden haul net¹

By the early 19^th century menhaden had become an "industrial-scale fertilizer" for the coastal farmlands of New England and the mid-Atlantic. When vast schools of migrating pogies swam past the beaches, farmers themselves would row out to surround them with seine nets. The hard problem was how to tow the bulging nets into shore.¹

Menhaden sloops and steamers in Gardiner's Bay, Long Island¹

Dumping fish on the top floor of a factory¹

Menhaden oil and fertilizer factory,
served by steamers unloading fish and an elevated railway¹

By the middle of the 19^th century the menhaden fishery was about to surpass whaling as the predominant  American harvest of the seas. Whales had been hunted relentlessly to be rendered into oil primarily for illumination, which was becoming supplanted by petroleum sources of energy. Menhaden were becoming recognized as a valuable source of oil for many industrial uses. Processing menhaden is known as 'reduction,' a series of factory renderings that produce oil and fish meal for both fertilizer and animal feed. With the development of the purse seine and engine power, seemingly unending quantities of menhaden could be brought to port.

Eben Phillips of Swampscott and Rockport²
The Fish Oil King

One of the first entrepreneurs to recognize the industrial potential of menhaden was Eben Phillips (1808-1875) who as a young man had dory-fished, then on schooners, from his native Swampscott. His achievements grew to include merchandising interests in Boston. One day in 1850 a woman from Blue Hills, Maine, showed him a sample of oil she had skimmed from a kettle in boiling menhaden for her hens. Phillips testified to the United States Fish Commission in 1877, "I told her I would give her $22 per barrel for all she would produce. The husband and sons made 13 barrels the first year. The fish were caught in gill-nets. The following year they caught 100 barrels. From that time and from that circumstance has grown a business as extensive as I have represented."³  His report refers to handling over a million and a half gallons of menhaden oil, as well as its fertilizer byproducts.

Promotional map of the Ocean View development
Rockport Town Hall archives

Eben Phillips lent his name to Phillips Avenue, a mile and a half meander by carriage that he constructed through extensive tracts of shoreline property he purchased from Pigeon Cove to Halibut Point, that at the time featured mostly subsistence farming, pastureland, and fishermen's dwellings. He laid out 175 prime residential lots. Astute in all things, he had begun acquiring the land in 1855 in anticipation of railroad service for urbane riders. The train from Boston reached Rockport in 1862.

Halibut Point and Ocean View
Detail of G. M. Hopkins Atlas, 1884

The acquisitional momentum of Ocean View surged into the present-day State Park lands in 1873 with the purchase of a twenty acre lot from Mary Babson, between Babson Farm and the Gott House. Shortly afterwards Eben Phillips reached the end of his life and the developing thrust of fine estates retracted. Ultimately the Rockport Granite Company absorbed this parcel within its quarrying operations. Many of the grand themes of Cape Ann history have actually or nearly affected this spot. 

Sources

1. H. Bruce Franklin, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America, Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2007, with illustrations taken from G. Brown Goode, A History of the Menhaden, 1880.

2. D. Hamilton Hurd, History Of Essex County Massachusetts, With Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers And Prominent Men, 1888.

3. Eben Phillips, "Statement concerning the menhaden fishery," from United States Fish Commission, Report of the Commissioner for 1877, Part V, 1879.