GREEN ISLAND.
Those who only know the Passaic of to-day can hardly realize that there was once a “Green Island” lying off the northern end of Mount Pleasant Cemetery which was a noted rendezvous for wild ducks and geese, with enough water between it and the shore to enable river craft to navigate the channel.
This Green Island was a thorn in the side of the cemetery people, who purchased it for $ 1,000, or thought they did; but soon came those who bluffed them into buying it over again, and this time they paid $10,000. When the Erie came it claimed that the cemetery had no rights in Green Island at all, and calmly pre-empted it for trackage purposes.
OF FISH AND FISHING.
Seventy-five years ago this was a hunter’s paradise, and even within the memory of some of us old codgers the fishing for shad and smelts was a well established industry. In fact, the fishing rights of Green Island were for hire, as I am told that one could rent them for a day or a week and do his own fishing. Old Fink, whoever he was, once gathered in five hundred shad in one haul; at least one of his contemporaries does solemnly affirm such to have been the case, and another as calmly tells me that fourteen bushels of smelts were the reward of two hauls, of which he had cognizance.
This almost sounds as if we were again on the lake of Gennesaret. But still greater wonders are recorded by Mr. William Stimis, eighty-seven years of age, who has heard his father say that he had seen 1,200 shad caught in one haul, and he, William, with three others, gathered in 120 bushels of smelts in one night. He also tells of a striped bass weighing sixty-six pounds, sturgeon six feet long and of a host of lesser fish that swam the Passaic.
THE SMELT OF THE PASSAIC RIVER.
In Graham’s American Monthly Magazine, 1854, appears a “Memoir on the Smelt of the Passaic River”, by Frank Forrester, from which the following brief facts are taken:—
The author was fond of classical allusions and high sounding phrases, and devotes two of his four pages to telling us how much he knows of things that do not pertain to the subject in hand, but when he gets down to “the delicious little fish known as the Smelt” we learn that it is the smallest of the salmon family, that the American smelt is larger than, and superior to, the European variety, and that its zoological name “osmerus” is from the Greek, and means “to give forth a perfume”, this having reference to the peculiar odor of cucumbers it exhales when fresh.
The smelt of the Passaic and Raritan rivers was an entirely different fish from that of the Connecticut and more eastern rivers, and commanded a far higher price in the New York markets, though much smaller, the majority being under six inches in length while the eastern smelt averages eleven to twelve inches. The whole fish was of the most brilliant pearly silver, with the slightest possible changeable hue of greenish blue along the back, “The peculiar cucumber odor, in the freshly caught fish, and the extreme delicacy of the flesh, both of which are (1854) so far superior in the fish of the Passaic, as to be obvious to the least inquisitive observer”. This Passaic smelt Mr. Herbert found agreed in every particular with the description of the European smelt.