With the nets and small sailing vessels the men caught fish in what were known as pound nets. These were staked out on weir poles.

The seafood and whatever other marketable farm produce they could assemble was conveyed up the Bay to the nearest and best cash market, which was Baltimore, one hundred miles from the end of the Neck. They brought back from this city clothing, sugar, molasses, kerosene and hardware, among other things. This contact with a large cosmopolitan city greatly influenced the lives and natures of the natives of the Northern Neck. Those who could manage it sent their children there to be educated. Other children were educated by older relatives, or by anyone who would teach them. Some received very little education during this period.

Children had few toys and those they had were almost as crude as those of the pioneer children--toys made of corn-cobs and pieces of wood.

Children were glad to have an old coffee pot to pull on a string. There was no money for toys.

Farther inland men turned to the forests where they cut cordwood and railroad ties. These were carried to the heads of the rivers and loaded on vessels bound for Baltimore, Philadelphia or Norfolk.

Men then did any sort of work where they could make an honest dollar and still stay in the Northern Neck. It was rugged but they managed to survive.

As things began to ease up, they picked up some of the old sports again--horse-racing, fox-hunting and jousting. The men were intensely interested in politics.

Court Day was one of the biggest events for the men in those days. These were colorful occasions, with the hundreds of people gathered together, horses tied to the rails and ox-carts, stallions and hucksters all milling about the green. This was an opportunity for making a little cash. There was a man at Heathsville, at one time, who made a specialty of "cent cakes" on Court Days. These were of especial interest to little boys who came with their fathers. The cakes were big round and flat and had one raisin in the center of each. Negro women cooked oyster stews in the open and served them on tables improvised from dry-goods boxes and covered with clean sheets. Bars were in full swing, brass knucks, pistols and knives glinted here and there. There were many fights, or tests of prowess. It was often late at night when the revelers, or perhaps their horses, found the way home over rough country roads.

The women had less exciting pleasures, such as quilting parties, "spending the day" with a neighbor, and church socials.

The colonial pattern of living and way of speech lingered on until the beginning of the twentieth century. Tradition tells of a wedding feast as late as 1872 where roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, conical sugar loaves and butter sculptured in the form of Solomon's Temple were featured. The flavor of seventeenth century England still lingered in the Northern Neck at that time.

The marriages between the families of the Neck were endless and thus the Anglo-Saxon strain remained pure in the region.

_SPEECH_

The early population in the Northern Neck were mostly from London and the surrounding counties where the classic English language of Shakespeare was spoken.

There is evidence that the speech of the people of the Northern Neck had from early days little of the provincial or dialectal about it.

Until the early part of the twentieth century such Shakespearean expressions as, "wrack upon ruin" and "all mommicked up," were commonly used in the Neck. The now archaic word mommick meant to mutilate. The play of the double noun was also frequently heard until a late date--men-folks, women-folks, baby-child, man-child, boy-man, and so on.

Many of the indentured servants came to the Northern Neck from Warwickshire and their manner of speech was added to the region, for instance: off sporting, or frolicking, meant, having a good time; traipsing about, meant, off walking about; make the fire, meant, kindle the fire, and peart, meant, lively.

The constant reading of the Bible also helped to keep the speech pure and simple.

_SHOPPING TRIPS_

After the war the shopping trips to Baltimore were resumed, but with a difference. There were few men in the Neck now and the women had changed. Hardened by sorrow and privations they were now able to face realities. There were many widows.

They gathered their children together, and all the produce they could assemble, and traveled to town on the sailing vessel of some older relative or neighbor who might be taking a cargo of oysters or cordwood to market.

When they arrived in Baltimore, usually in the very early morning, the sleepy children must be aroused and dressed. Pantalettes,[10] so painstakingly laundered before leaving home, were now dirty and wrinkled. With the bedraggled children, coops of quacking ducks and hissing geese, crates of eggs and firkins of lard and butter, the brave women finally landed on the dock and made their way up Light Street to the commission merchants, who would buy their produce. After disposing of their business they went to the stores to shop for necessities to carry home to the Northern Neck.

[Footnote 10: Pantalettes were generally worn about 1830-50. The fact that they were still being worn by children of the Northern Neck is probably due to the isolated location of this peninsula.]

_MENHADEN_

In their voyage of discovery in the Chesapeake Captain John Smith and his companions found schools of fish agitating the surface of the water.

The written accounts of these men state that the fish were so thick that they attempted to dip them up in a frying-pan but it proved to be "not a good instrument to catch fish with."

These fish are believed to have been menhaden, known to naturalists as brevoortia. This ordinary looking fish was destined to change the course of history in the lower Northern Neck.

The Indian names for this species, munnawhatteaug (corrupted to menhaden), and pauhagen (pogy), literally means fertilizer--"fish that enriches the earth." The Indians were accustomed to employ this species, with others of the herring tribe, in enriching their cornfields. They showed the white men how to make their corn grow by putting two dead fish in each hill of corn.

The following passage written by Thomas Morton in 1632 shows the use of fish as fertilizer in Virginia at that time: "There is a fish at the spring of the yeare that passe up the rivers to spawn in the ponds, & are taken in such multitudes that the inhabitants fertilize their grounds with them."

The menhaden was called alewife by the Virginia colonists because of its resemblance to the allied species known by that name in England. Alewife was corrupted to old-wife and ell-wife. It has been said that the half-grown menhaden were called bug-fish by Virginia negroes in early days because they believed them to have been produced from insects.

This superstition probably arose from the fact that a parasitic crustacean, known to watermen as "a fish louse," was often found clinging to the roof of the menhaden's mouth.

The menhaden had many other popular names, among them: porgie, bony-fish, poggie, mossbunker, greentail, bunker, yellowtail, white-fish, fat back, and another Indian name, chebog. "Mossbunker" is a relic of the Dutch Colony at New Amsterdam. It was in use there as early as 1661, probably a corruption of their Dutch word, _marsbancker_.

It is said that the Indians did not like to eat menhaden because of their oily content. Many years later it was learned that this fish was also rich in minerals. Early settlers ate them, salted them for winter use, and fed them to the stock.

Catesby wrote, 1731-1742, concerning a fish called a "Fatback: It is an excellent Sweet Fish, and so excessive fat that Butter is never used in frying. At certain Seasons and Places there are infinite Numbers of these Fish caught, and are much esteemed by the Inhabitants for their Delicacy."

Menhaden were used to some extent as a food by watermen for many years but it does not appear probable that they were ever extensively used for food except in seasons of scarcity. They were used for many years to feed stock.

Menhaden were used at an early date as a fertilizer all along the Atlantic coast. In 1792 a paper published in New York gave directions concerning the use of fish as a fertilizer: "Experiments made by using the fish called menhaden or mossbankers as a manure have succeeded beyond all expectation. In dunging corn in the holes, put two in a hill on any kind of soil where corn will grow, and you will have a good crop.

Put them on a piece of poor loamy land and by their putrefaction they so enrich the land that you may mow about two tons per acre." About eight or ten thousand fish to the acre was considered about the right amount.

Farmers also spread the fish "head to tail" in a plowed furrow and covered them with earth. They also mixed the fish with earth in a compost.

It seems that the possibilities of making use of the fish oil were not considered at this time. Whale oil was still being used. It was not until about 1850 that the value of menhaden oil was recognized.

The following statement of Eben B. Phillips, a Boston oil merchant, dated 1874, throws some light on the beginning of the use of menhaden oil: "In about 1850 I was in the oil business in Boston. An elderly lady by the name of Bartlett, from Bluehill, Maine, came to my store with a sample of oil which she had skimmed from a kettle in boiling menhaden for her hens. She told me the fish were abundant all summer near the shore. I told her I would give her $11 per barrel for all she would produce. Her husband and sons made 13 barrels the first year. The fish then were caught in gill-nets. The following year they made 100 barrels.

From that time and from that circumstance has grown a business as extensive as I have represented."

Mr. Phillips then furnished nets, and large kettles, which they set up out-of-doors in brick frames, for drying out the fish. It was thought that much oil was thrown away with the refuse fish or scrap, and the idea of pressing this scrap was suggested. At first this was accomplished by pressing it in a common iron kettle with a heavy cover and a long beam for a lever. Later it was weighted down by heavy rocks, in barrels and tubs perforated with auger holes. Mr. Phillips then fitted out some fifty parties on the coast of Maine with presses of the model known as the screw and lever press.

Others claim to have manufactured menhaden oil at about the same time.

"At that time," according to another statement from Rhode Island, "there were some few whalemen's try-pots used by other parties in boiling the fish in water and making a very imperfect oil and scrap."

Tradition says that at first some of the oil merchants mixed the menhaden oil with whale oil, or sold it outright as whale oil. It was used for tanning hides, currying, in paint, in soap, for "smearing sheep" and for other things.

After the value of menhaden oil was recognized many makeshift menhaden fish factories were established along the coast of Maine and elsewhere on the northern coast. It was much easier for the whaling men to go offshore a few miles, return with a boat-load of fish and spend the night at home.

By the end of the Civil War the menhaden catch along the coast of Maine was beginning to drop off.

In 1866 a party of New Englanders visiting the Chesapeake found menhaden in almost incredible quantities--"they were so thick that for 25 miles along the shore there was a solid flip-flap of the northward swimming fish." One member of the party is said to have jumped into the water and with a dip-net thrown bushels of fish upon the beach.

In December, 1866, the floating fish-factory, _Ranger_ of 1,500 tons, hailing from Greenport, N. Y., came to Virginia. She was equipped to cook fish and extract oil on board. Tradition says that on these first floating factories the scrap was thrown overboard. The _Ranger_ remained in Virginia only about eleven days during that year but returned each of the two succeeding years.

In the late summer of 1867, Elijah W. Reed, of Sedgwick, Maine, loaded his kettles and presses on two small sailing vessels, the _Two Brothers_ and the _A. F. Powers_, and sailed for Virginia. He landed first at Back River, then moved up the Chesapeake and operated his kettles and presses on the Bay shore between the Little Wicomico and the Great Wicomico Rivers. The spot was in Northumberland County and was later known as Ketchum's Camp.

That winter the New Englander moved into Cockrell's Creek, in the same county. It was a sheltered harbor near the mouth of the Bay with deep water running close to the shore. He built there, at Point Pleasant, the first menhaden plant on the Chesapeake Bay.

From 1868 factories were built from time to time by local people, and others, on points in Cockrell's Creek, and at other points on various inlets of the Chesapeake, and on Tangier Island.

These early factories were known as "kettle-factories." The kettles were brought down the Bay from Baltimore. The menhaden products, oil and green scrap in bulk, were carried back to the same city by sailing vessels. The scrap, or guano, was sold both in the city market and locally for fertilizer.