When the Waterfront Smelled Like Money

When the Waterfront Smelled Like Money: Remembering the Shad Boats, Fish Factories and Families That Helped Build Carteret County

Ask someone who grew up around Morehead City or Beaufort about the old fish factories, and there is a good chance the memory will begin with the smell.

When the wind carried it across town, there was no mistaking it. Millions of small, oily fish were being cooked, pressed and processed along the waterfront.

Visitors sometimes complained. Local people knew it meant something else.

The boats were catching. The factories were running. Men and women were working. Paychecks were coming home.

It was the smell of money.

Here, They Were Shad

The proper name is Atlantic menhaden, but generations of Carteret County residents simply called them shad. They were also known elsewhere as pogies, bunker or fatback.

Menhaden are small, silvery schooling fish found from Nova Scotia to northern Florida. They filter tiny organisms from the water and provide food for larger fish, seabirds, sharks and marine mammals.

They were rarely destined for anyone’s supper plate. Menhaden are oily and filled with small bones, but almost every part of the fish could be used.

Factories cooked and pressed them to extract oil. The remaining fish meal and solids became fertilizer and feed for poultry, livestock, pets and farm-raised fish. Menhaden oil found its way into paint, soap, linoleum and, in later years, nutritional supplements. The fish also remained valuable as bait.

Small as they were, shad supported one of Carteret County’s largest and most important industries.

One Industry, Two Waterfronts

Morehead City and Beaufort each had its own waterfront, factories, docks and fishing families. Hard-core locals know the two histories are connected, but not interchangeable.

The menhaden economy crossed the water between them.

Local historians generally date the beginning of Carteret County’s modern menhaden industry to 1865. Among its early successful operators were the Dey brothers, northern businessmen who established a factory at Lennoxville, east of Beaufort.

Other factories soon appeared around Bogue Sound, Taylor’s Creek, Town Creek and the Newport River.

Morehead City’s Menhaden Story

By 1886, Morehead City merchant and seafood dealer Daniel Bell was reportedly operating two menhaden plants, one on Bogue Sound and another near Lennoxville.

Charles S. Wallace later became one of the best-known local figures in the industry. Wallace came from a Portsmouth Island family and moved to Morehead City as a teenager. He opened a factory at Crab Point in 1898, followed by another at Smyrna in 1900.

In 1911, Wallace built a larger plant approximately three miles west of Morehead City on Bogue Sound, opposite the site associated today with Carteret Health Care.

Historic photographs also preserve the Promise Land Menhaden Factory, an industrial presence along the Morehead City shoreline that many families still remember.

Wallace Fisheries and other operations brought fleets of working boats to local docks. Names such as the C.P. Dey, Dewey, Miss Morehead, Evelyn L. Willis and Simpson Brothers became part of waterfront life.

Some vessels had already lived other lives before entering the menhaden trade. The Evelyn L. Willis, for example, had reportedly served as a submarine chaser before becoming a fishing vessel.

Boats were often owned by individual captains or businessmen who sold their catch to a particular plant. As the industry grew and consolidated, companies increasingly acquired their own vessels and built larger boats capable of carrying more fish.

Beaufort’s Fish Factories

Across the water, factories including Beaufort Fisheries, Standard Products, Sea and Sound Processing and Harvey Smith’s Fish Meal Company became fixtures of Beaufort’s working waterfront.

Their fleets tied up along Taylor’s Creek and Town Creek. During the busiest periods, factories could operate around the clock.

Workers came from Beaufort, Morehead City, North River, Harlowe, Craven Corner and communities throughout Down East. The industry provided jobs for captains, pilots, mates, engineers, ring setters, net pullers and purse-boat crews. On shore, people worked as factory foremen, mechanics, cooks, net repairers, truck drivers and processing-plant employees.

The financial reach extended even farther. Grocery stores, fuel docks, hardware stores, shipyards and repair shops all benefited when the shad were running.

By 1970, five large factories were operating in the combined Beaufort-Morehead City area. Two stood near one another on Bogue Sound, two were located along Taylor’s Creek and another operated on the Beaufort Channel of the Newport River.

The Industry at Its Height

The scale of the industry is difficult to imagine today.

In 1945 alone, Carteret County’s eight menhaden factories reportedly processed more than 157 million fish. Approximately 2,000 men and women worked aboard local vessels or inside the plants.

For decades, menhaden led North Carolina’s commercial fisheries in pounds landed. From 1950 through 2004, shad surpassed every other state fishery by volume during most years.

As late as 1997, North Carolina fishermen landed almost 100 million pounds of menhaden.

At Beaufort Fisheries, the equipment eventually became capable of processing as many as three million fish in 24 hours. Standard Products could reportedly handle approximately 150,000 fish an hour.

When the fishing was good, the waterfront could feel alive with boats, machinery, factory whistles, gulls and the steady movement of people going to work.

Finding the Shad

Before airplanes and modern electronics, a crewman watched from the vessel’s crow’s nest, scanning the surface for a school of fish.

A large body of menhaden could darken the water like an oil slick. Diving birds, movement on the surface or a change in the water’s color could lead crews to the fish.

Later, spotter pilots flew above the coast and directed vessels to the schools below.

Once the fish were located, two smaller purse boats were launched from the mother vessel. The boats traveled together until they reached the school, then separated and moved in opposite directions while releasing a large net.

The boats circled the fish and met again. A line pulled the bottom of the net closed like a drawstring purse.

The crew then began hardening the fish, drawing in the net and concentrating the catch into a smaller space. The menhaden could be bailed or pumped aboard the mother vessel and carried back to the factory.

The work demanded experience and absolute cooperation. A mistake around the nets, ropes, machinery or a heavy body of fish could have terrible consequences.

The Men Who Sang Together

African American fishermen were the backbone of much of Carteret County’s menhaden industry.

They worked as crewmen, mates, pilots, engineers and captains, even during decades when segregation barred them from many establishments along the same waterfronts their labor helped support.

Before hydraulic power blocks and mechanical systems took over the heaviest work, men pulled the nets by hand. To coordinate their movements, they sang work songs known as chanteys.

A leader called out a line, and the crew answered. The rhythm brought everyone’s hands and bodies together for the pull.

The songs drew from hymns, spirituals, gospel music, blues and everyday experiences. They helped the men endure cold, exhaustion and the tremendous weight of a full net.

People along the shore sometimes heard the voices carrying across the water.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, hydraulic equipment had largely replaced manual net hauling. The songs grew quiet, but they were not forgotten.

In 1988, retired African American fishermen from Carteret County gathered and began singing the old work songs again. They became the Menhaden Chanteymen, eventually performing across North Carolina, at Carnegie Hall and on national broadcasts.

Their music preserved more than songs. It preserved the rhythm of the work and the voices of men whose labor helped build the local economy.

Names Carried Through the Generations

The history of menhaden fishing is preserved through the names of the people who worked it.

Capt. Dewey Lewis was so respected that the Wallace Fisheries boat Dewey was named for him. Leroy Cox spent approximately 45 years in the industry. Bill Lewis remembered the boats, fishing grounds and nights when tightly packed schools of menhaden seemed to light the water. Capt. David Willis spent half a century running menhaden vessels.

Ernest Davis worked as a mate for Harvey Smith’s Fish Meal Company, Wallace Fisheries and Beaufort Fisheries.

Their stories represent hundreds of local men and women whose names may not appear in history books but remain part of family conversations.

Some Carteret County fishermen followed the shad far beyond local waters. Crews traveled north along the Atlantic Coast and south to the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes spending long periods away before returning home.

For many families, the fall fishing season provided money for Christmas and carried them through the quieter winter months.

The Day the Parkins Went Down

The industry also carried terrible risks.

On December 17, 1942, the menhaden vessel Parkins went down in a storm a few miles west of Beaufort Inlet.

Eighteen fishermen, including Capt. David Davis, lost their lives. Capt. Davis was an accomplished African American captain from a fishing family with roots at Davis Ridge. Only two years earlier, he and the crew of the Parkins had reportedly caught more menhaden than any other boat working between New Jersey and Texas.

The loss was felt across Beaufort, Morehead City, North River, Harlowe and other communities where menhaden families lived.

For many, it felt as though everyone knew someone aboard.

The Last Factory Closes

By the closing decades of the 20th century, the local industry was changing.

Smaller companies had closed or been absorbed. Boats, factories and processing equipment became increasingly expensive to maintain. Waterfront property values rose as tourism, retirement and development expanded.

There were also growing complaints about factory odors and concerns about industrial processing and fishing practices.

Beaufort Fisheries was the last menhaden-reduction plant operating in North Carolina. When it closed in January 2005, approximately 140 years of industrial menhaden processing in Carteret County came to an end.

The plant was later demolished.

A North Carolina law effective in 2013 prohibited the traditional industrial purse-seine operation using a mother ship and runner boats within the state’s three-mile coastal jurisdiction.

Menhaden fishing did not disappear completely. Shad remain valuable as bait, and Carteret County fishermen have continued working aboard vessels operating from Virginia and the Gulf Coast.

What the Shad Left Behind

The factories are gone. The boats no longer crowd the docks, and the voices of working chanteymen no longer travel across the water.

But the industry remains part of the Crystal Coast.

It lives in the names of boats and captains, in photographs tucked away by local families, in the music of the Menhaden Chanteymen and in the memories of people who watched the fleet return.

It lives in families whose parents and grandparents worked on the boats, repaired the nets, cooked for crews, operated factory machinery or waited at home for the men to return.

The shad were small fish that few people wanted to eat.

Yet they provided livelihoods, sustained businesses and helped build two waterfront communities.

For those who remember, even the smell carried meaning.

It was the smell of work.

It was the smell of home.

And it was the smell of money.