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.

"Heyyyy. What's up, Mrs. R?"

"So what are you doing these days?"

It's a question I hear often as I make my daily way through the towns where I've lived and worked for a total of 30+ years.

When I retired from teaching in a local high school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and did it. It took four years, reams of paper, a quart of printer ink, and crippling moments of self-doubt.

"Wow. Good to see you. So, you're retired? Reading books and going on vacation, huh?"

I hear variations of the same at the gas pump, in the produce aisle, at the nail salon, etc. 

My answer always follows a pause on my part, deciding whether to lead with the part-time care of my two-year-old granddaughter or with the all-the-rest-of-the-time care of writing. The latter is the more difficult choice. But over the course of those four years, there were times I needed to say it aloud to prove my intention to myself. And of course, now that the novel is about to appear on the book market, it needs to be the first-choice answer.

"Well, I just finished a novel," I say to reactions that are generally along the lines of:

"No kidding. Wow. Now what?" or "Really? What's it about?" or "Seriously? Do you have a publisher?" and a few times: "What's your elevator speech?" 

More questions. I like answers - even though, ironically, Don't Ya Know  is all about questions, the ones that haven't any clear answers.

I have stumbled through different replies, finally coming up with a quick and descriptive one: "It's a story of faith told by unbelievers."

I really liked the sound of that, but I had to drop it after awhile because the people who were actually interested wanted to know more. I didn't have more to say on the topic, I wasn't sure it was a topic to begin with, and how tall is the building  this elevator is in anyway?

So I changed my answer to: "It's about the people of a secluded island who find themselves facing a whole new world when the beaches of the area become recreational havens at the turn of the 19th century."

That seemed to be a conversation-ender, earning a pat response: "That sounds interesting."  Click.

So for a long while I just just said: "Well, we have our first grandchild now..."

Then I wrote up a script for myself and went to a writers' conference in Atlanta.

Every conversation I had was delivered as if the conversants were living sandwich boards. "I'll tell you  my elevator speech if you tell me yours." One woman, who presented her companies' services under the guise of helping writers master the universe, asked to read the first page of Don't Ya Know and followed up with an invitation to have coffee in the dining area. Ten minutes into an 11-minute conversation she explained what paying her marketing experts $10-20,000 would get me. It was an answer I already knew, so I excused myself and asked for my first page back.

I'm familiar with this part of self-publishing. It's the lonely part where I spend time wondering who I am to think other people will enjoy reading what I write?

I go to confession and tell my writer friends that I don't have an answer. They whisper back to me in the darkness of the internet confessional booth that they don't know either.  Is it a compulsion, I ask? Were we the kids who demanded all the adults watch us perform in the living room? Am I doing that again in my 6os?"

Bless me, for I confess to all of the above. I love to tell stories. I love to trade mine for theirs with friends around a dinner table. Hear our grown kids' stories of how they viewed their childhoods. Listen to the time you ran on a Long Island beach with me under the moonlight, or how you felt the day we knew your ailing mother would die, or your marriage would end, or a fear was real or a baby was coming.

Don't Ya Know is the story of all those stories. The ones you told me. The ones I told you. The ones we read, the ones we taught in classrooms, the ones we acted out on stage, as well as the stories that wove around us while we did those things. How can we be anything but a sum of our stories?

So one answer came to me: Don't Ya Know published itself.

***************

Available in ebook and paperback from online booksellers,  May 2015.

www.suzannerosenwasser.com

Don't Ya Know: What I know, think I know, and know I don't know

The woods at Ke'was End

DON'T YA KNOW is the first novel I've written.  The story takes place on Corycian (Core'seen) Island in the early 20th century as Islanders cope with the change a new time period enforces.

Once odorous fish-processing plants dotted the New York shorelines; however, by 1900 they have been replaced with grandly gracious homes; breezy, yacht clubs; and palatial, resort hotels.

The indigenous community of Corycian Island watches as a new culture disembarks from the Westside Ferry. Lovelorn secretaries, sharp-eyed spiritualists, breathless bachelors, wealth-seeking developers, idiot klan members, disgraced priests, naive nuns, and muscular Christians arrive. They are shoreless refugees seeking a connection to the ether sifting through the universe.  

It is said such a vortex exists on the east point of the Island at Ke'was End, where the Runapewak, the tru-people, are stewards
of the land, protecting it for Mother Earth and Father Sky.

Runapewak. The Tru-people. All-a-wanna.

Large docks extend from Corycian's Strand Hotel

Great American Planes stand tall on Ke'Was End

The Corycian Island Reader, a weekly broadsheet tells the Island's story