Fish Oil Factories on Long Island

Fish Oil Factories and the Long Island Stench 
by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Photo: George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887). Deserted Fish Oil Factory, Shelter Island, New York, ca. 1872-1887. Collodion silver glass wet plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.2-360 



Fish oil factories dotted the 400 miles of Long Island’s coastline before the early 20th century. 

Before Long Island's coast was discovered as a respite for the weary, it housed huge and smelly fish oil factories at points along its shore where fish oil production was the mainstay of the economy for generations. Locals seined mossbunker, slimy fish indigenous to the area, and boiled them with bat guano. The word guano refers to dung used as an agricultural fertilizer; it's usually found on rocks or on the floors of caves. Mining bat and seabird guano from  ice-age deposits of granite all over the LI  was an industry in itself. Locals scraped fresh or fossilized guano into pails and sold the contents by weight to the fish oil factories.They pressed the resulting mush to extract an oil known in the trade as 'Long Island Shit.' Containers of the thick, slimy oil were transported to depots where it was processed into fertilizer. 

The oily slime was then spread on lima bean, tomato, and potato fields all across Long Island's farms which stretched far and wide between its shorelines before the arrival of the Victorian era and the discovery of sunbathing by the seaside

East End bayman, Bruce Collins (a menhaden fleet fisherman from 1954-1960), spoke at the East Hampton Library in 2015 about the industry in the Twomey Lecture Series. The East Hampton Star's Irene Silverman covered the event in an article entitled: "The Most Valuable Fish That Swims," (Sept. 24, 2015). She reported that Mr. Collins said the fish oil factories were centered in an area of Gardiner's Bay known as "Promised Land" because of the enormous schools of menhaden found there:

“These fish were put on the face of the earth just to feed other fish. They have no teeth. They swim in huge schools with their mouths open. You can cast into a school of a million bunkers all day long and never catch one. They’re not going to take your lure," Collins said. 

In the 21st century, the popularity of fish oil for medicinal and cosmetic uses has increased the mossbunker's value. Billions of the bony fish are caught with hydraulic cranes attached to huge nets. However, in the early days, it was huge men who were hired to haul the bunker nets. This required no particular maritime skill other than pure brawn.  In The Fish Factory, Barbara Garrity-Blake writes this factor contributed to integration on Long Island when many muscular, black men turned to menhaden fleets for work.

Processing fish oil wasn't the only large industry along that stretch of the eastern seaboard. In fact, horse processing plants joined fish oil processors to further pollute the shores and let loose an ever more odious smell. This kept the hardiest of souls from trying to get a breath of fresh air at the beach. One factory worker said it was an odor of "sewage and death."

www.szannerosenwasser.com

Don't Ya Know, a Long Island novel by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser, available at online retailers.