Newsman's sport fishing column & report

Sport fishing column for Jan 16 to 23, 2012

The year is 1866 and much of the talk in Charlestown, New Hampshire, centers on Pastor Livingston Stone and his fascination with propagating fish, in the Cold Spring Trout Ponds, a few hundred yard from his church.

Stone found fish culturing absolutely fascinating and would leave the ministry, in 1868, to follow his new found passion, fulltime. A student of the works of two Frenchmen, Joseph Remy and Antoine Gehin, and their 1843 fish restoration project on the Moselle River in France, Stone in later years would write;

"The present age of almost daily recurring marvels had hardly begun then, and people were more incredulous and slower to accept apparent miracles than they are now… The thrill of pleasing excitement that tingled to our finger ends when we first saw the little black in the unhatched embryo which told us that our egg was alive."

After leaving his pastorate, Stone built the first fish farm in New England, and went into business marketing fish and miniature hatchery kits. As a man given to charity Stone did not keep his knowledge a secret and shared it readily with anyone who wanted to listen. He wrote a newspaper column and a book on the best method of raising fish. He also became a founding member of the American Fish Culturists Association.

Stone was a good salesman; so good that he sold the profit right out of his own industry. To some this would be a catastrophe, but not for this man of the cloth. Just when it looked like the end, the big boss moved the good pastor from New Hampshire, east to west, and opened the door to Stone's own manifest destiny. In the late spring of 1872, Spencer Fullerton Baird, head of the US Fish Commission, offered Stone the job of building and operating the first government fish hatchery in North America.

In hostile territory, fifty miles from any semblance of civilization, Stone had the first salmon hatchery in North America, on operating in the fall of 1872. While collecting his first stock of spawning salmon, on California's McLoud River, Stone spotted a new fish, one the local natives called syoolott, a fish we know as the rainbow trout. Seven years later in 1879, with their lives at risk, Stone and his crew would build North America's first government trout hatchery, on California's Crook Creek.

As a point of reference, the first government sport fish hatchery in Canada would not be built until 1911.

The report

With everything icing over, there is nothing to report this week.