Humble Herring Used to Cost $1 per 1,000; Now 15 Cents Each, Feb. 20, 1920

From the front page of The Independent, Elizabeth City, N.C., Feb. 20, 1920

The Rise of the Humble Herring. . . Once Plentiful at $1 per 1,000, Now Selling at 15 Cents Each

Herring sold at 15 cents a piece on the Elizabeth City retail fish market last week and the fact has raised little or no comment, and yet it hasn’t been a quarter of a century since herring sold for $1 a thousand no one thought of buying them at retail at all.

Twenty or 25 years ago the herring was the staple article of diet of the poor and middle classes of eastern North Carolina. Great seine fisheries on the sound of North Carolina caught millions of herring in a day. Every family had its barrel of salted herring and most folk had herring smoked or dried. Corn bread and herring built the bone and sinew of the proletariat. We ate herrings for breakfast and herring for supper. The thrifty farmer of the piney woods region of Perquimans and Chowan counties bought carloads of herring from the fisheries of Chowan Sound, salted and smoked these herring, and carted them to Norfolk, Va., where they found a ready market. The fisheries on Chowan Sound salted and smoked these herring for shipment to every corner of the globe. Before this generation the Chowan fisheries sent many a cargo of herring to England to exchange for brick, wood-work, Grandfather Clocks, silverware, table ware, linens and scarlet coats. Other cargoes of herring went to the West Indies in exchange for sugar and rum.

The herring precluded the entry of old man High Cost of Living into eastern North Carolina for more than a century. Labor living on corn pone and herring washed down with tea made from home grown yopon and with home made sorghum, a meal costing hardly more than a cent a person, never dreamed of kicking on wages of 75 cents or a dollar a day. Large families had no terrors for the fish fed proletariat.

But within a few years a great change has been wrought. Nearly all of the great seine fisheries have disappeared. Where a catch of a hundred thousand herrings in a seine was once considered a poor haul, now a thousand herring taken in a pound net stand is considered a great catch. Herring cost nearly as much to-day as other foods, and if they cost less people probably wouldn’t want to eat them at all.