Regulating 18th Century Pembroke's Herring Fishery
Evidence from Town Meetings in the 1760s and 1770s
[Readers, it is the time of year when the herring run up our coastal streams in this part of the world, and therefore I thought it a good time to publish a piece on this fishery over 250 years ago, adopted from my doctoral dissertation. It’s on Pembroke’s management of its herring run in the 1760s and 1770s, which, even in the revolutionary crisis, was a major task of town government. I have tried to keep the original spelling and grammar when quoting primary sources.
This piece is for paid subscribers, who have been very patient. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you can do so by clicking the button immediately below this paragraph. Thanks as always for reading. — Ben Cronin.]
Despite the furor over the Stamp Act that erupted in Pembroke and other Towns of Plymouth County, the regular collective life of the community continued with the passing seasons. In the spring of 1766, the Town voted to retain the same fish laws as the previous year (the streams to be open from April 15th through May 31st), with the exception that the Selectmen were empowered to allow dams to be kept down where they saw fit.1 Later that Spring, the Town Meeting chose Samuel Gould “to Renew the Lin[e]s and Bounds of the School Farm so Called Lying in the County of Hampshier Granted to the town of Pembroke By the General Court in the year 1736 to enable Said town of Pembroke to Keep a Grammer School[.]” Swine were to run at large, ringed and yoked as usual.2
These relatively quotidian, albeit essential, aspects of the Town's life, the regulation of its common resources, continued unabated throughout the revolutionary crisis. The fish laws remained largely unchanged for the rest of the 1760s, though there were some exceptions.