Shad fisheries

fisheries were Camden’s first industries as shown on the circa 1810 map above. Fishermen caught shad by the ton along the shore near the confluence of the Cooper and Delaware. John McPhee’s The Founding Fish traced the shad’s demise starting with the Lenape and early settlers spearing schools of spawning shad herded into weirs in the early 1800s to when gill nets were invented allowing fishing farther from shore. The shad harvest peaked in the early 1900s then began to collapse from overfishing and river pollution.