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.