Railroad bridge in Newport
NEWPORT—Dick Chaffee of Derby didn’t know for sure what destroyed the Clyde River salmon run, but he had some theories. It bothered him that maybe even he played a minor role in its demise.
Chaffee shared his memories of working at the salmon stripping operation on the Clyde during the late 1930s—in the days of his youth—while working part-time for the Vermont Fish and Game Department (now the Fish and Wildlife Department). Eggs and sperm were stripped from the fish and shipped to a hatchery where the eggs were hatched. The young salmon were then stocked in other bodies of water—some outside Vermont.
Remembering the river of his youth, a river that attracted hundreds of fishermen from across New England, and sometimes from beyond, Chaffee called the river “probably one of the best salmon streams in the nation.” That was back in the days when Newport was a bustling railroad community. Back than the community, situated on the south end of Lake Memphremagog, was home to several large hotels.
Newport was a busy place back in those days, Chaffee said. The streets were filled with cars and lined with stores. But, if he recalled right, he said there was no busier time of year in Newport than during the spring salmon run. “The hotels used to be filled with guys coming up here to go fishing,” he said. Those hotels, like much of the salmon run, are now only memories. Among the hotels located on the lower side of Main Street, in the general region of Main Street, often referred to by locals as Railroad Square, were Newport House, Raymond Hotel, and Hurst Hotel. Newport House stood where Chittenden Bank is located today, while Hurst Hotel was in the vicinity of where Needleman’s Bride and Formal Wear now does business. Azur’s Mini Mart and Little G’s is in the approximate spot where Raymond Hotel once stood.
These two fishermen sure can’t complain about their day’s catch
The salmon run meant more than fish to the region, it also meant money, Chaffee said. Fishermen spent their money on hotel rooms, at stores, and bars. Big businesses made big money as did the small businesses. Each spring some ordinary citizens developed creative ways to make money off the fish runs and the men and women who fished the river. Chaffee remembered how a fellow named George Moore made a bit of extra money. He had a self-serve bait business on the railroad bridge that now connects Shaw’s Supermarket parking lot with Newport’s Main Street. The bridge was by far one of the favorite fishing spots for fishermen, and undoubtedly the most photographed fishing spots for people who wanted to capture a truly spectacular annual event. Moore kept a large mesh container of minnows in the water where fishermen could scoop out their day’s bait. In turn, the fishermen dropped a nickel into a container as payment. Most of the time the fishermen were honest, and they paid for their bait, but that wasn’t always the case, Chaffee said.
“One day he came down and there wasn’t any money and there weren’t any minnows,” Chaffee said.
Reflecting back to the days of the river of old, he told how the river was a big part of his youth. The salmon ran the river twice each year, he explained. They ran in the spring, not to spawn, but to eat the eggs of the other fish species that laid their eggs in the spring, fish such as suckers. Come fall, the salmon migrated up the river to lay their eggs. Unlike today, he said fishermen had enough sense not to fish for, or harass, the salmon during the fall run as some fishermen do today.
“I don’t approve of it,” he shook his head. “I don’t see any sense in it.”
The weather, especially the temperature, was the biggest factor in determining when the salmon began their spring migration, Chaffee said. Cold weather kept the water cold, which in turn kept the ice from retreating from the lake. Until the ice began to recede from the inlet of the lake, he said the salmon would not begin their journey upstream. A typical run began in early to mid April, he said. Although most of the fish left the river within three to four weeks, some stragglers were caught as late as June.
Living just a short walk from the river on the east side of Newport, Chaffee said he caught his fair share of fish. “Money was scarce in them days so if you had a salmon on the table you had a meal. They made a lot of meals for a lot of poor people. My mother use to bake them—boy, weren’t they delicious.”
There were a fair number of salmon that weighed more than 10 pounds, Chaffee said. If his memory was accurate, he seemed to recall the biggest salmon he caught weighed in at about nine and a half pounds. It was a ball to catch really big salmon, he said. The fish jumped out of the water and danced across the water on their tails in an attempt to shake the hook free. Although it’s in almost every fisherman’s blood to go for the big fish, he said, his mother preferred salmon in the four to five pound range, because she thought they tasted better than the bigger ones.
He excitedly told about a couple of big battles he fought with salmon in what was known as the butternut hole. This particular hole was destroyed when Citizens Utilities built the controversial Number 11 dam, a dam that has since been removed. Nobody knows who named the hole, but the reason for its name is obvious. The banks of the river in that particular section of the river were lined with butternut trees.
“On two different occasions I hooked big salmon and I couldn’t hold on to them,” Chaffee said. “They went down the river and that was the end of my line. They took every bit of my line. At least I held onto my fish pole.”
A lot of people fished on the railroad bridge, but Chaffee said most of the time he chose to avoid fishing there. When he did, though, he did so during the early morning hours before the morning crowd arrived. “I didn’t like fishing elbow to elbow. It used to be lined right up with guys.”
He estimated 100 or more fishermen could fit on the bridge. A lot of fish were caught off that bridge, he said, but the aggravation wasn’t always worth the excitement of the catch. Getting a bite down there was one thing, catching the fish was another. Sometimes four or five people had fish on at a time. While most of the fishermen were courteous and reeled up their lines when they saw their neighbor had a fish on, others would not.”
“That is poor sportsmanship,” Chaffee said, bristling at the memories of the fishermen who refused to abide by the unwritten rules of the bridge. That type of behavior led to tangled line, lost fish, and angry words. Many fishermen today view fishing as a sport, he said. Not so during the lean years of the 1930s and 1940s. A missed fish could mean a missed meal. Far fewer fishermen returned fish back to the water to be caught another day like they do today, not necessarily because they were fish hogs, but because the fish helped supplement their diets.
Chaffee’s favorite fishing spot was a short walk upstream from the railroad bridge near the “Iron Bridge,” a bridge that spanned the river at the junction of Clyde Street and Hill Street. It was under that bridge where he caught his first salmon. “I caught more salmon under that bridge, but I also lost a ton of hooks and sinkers,” Chaffee laughed. Back then, he said, fishermen could buy 100 hooks for about 50 cents, but times being tough, he seldom had the money to buy sinkers. Instead, he resorted to using old nuts and bolts for weight.
Good fishing and little or no fishing pressure from other fishermen were two of the reasons he chose to fish at the Iron Bridge instead of at the railroad bridge. The Iron Bridge was also a short walk from his home on the east side of Newport. Even during his walk to work, he’d sling his fishing boots over his back, and grab his fishing pole for a bit of fishing on his way to work. After catching a fish or two he continued his journey to work with his fish and pole in his hands. Just before reaching work, he’d stop by Ben Smith’s butcher shop and put the fish in the cooler where they stayed until the end of his work day.
Chaffee laughed that in his younger days he could even take a short break from fishing and do a little boxing. He told how the Britch boys—brothers who were quite well known on the region’s boxing circuit—held impromptu boxing matches in an abandoned mill located on Clyde Street near a big bend in the river known as the Before Hole. The fishing hole was named after the Before family that once lived nearby. “If we got sick of fishing we’d go up there and put on a pair of boxing gloves,” he said.
Some of today’s fishermen who didn’t live through the days of the big salmon runs are fond of blaming the demise of the salmon run solely on Citizens Utilities, the hydroelectric producer that built a series of dams on the river, some which are still used today to generate electricity.
The Number 11 dam, which was built in 1957, and stood until 1991, is blamed for being the major culprit for the destruction of the salmon run. However, historical evidence and the stories told by the older generation of fishermen, provide evidence that by the time the dam was built, the salmon runs had declined to a point where they were little more than memories. Chaffee had little doubt that Number 11 played a role in helping bring the run to an end, but, he said, the dam was only one factor. Fishermen kept too many fish in earlier years, he said, noting that only so many fish can be taken from a river. Although not directly related to the demise of the run, he also speculated that the straightening of the lower portion of the river to make way for the I-91 access road in the late 1960s made it even more difficult for the salmon to reestablish themselves in the river. Before the construction, that section of river had big bends where big fish lurked. Today that section of river looks more like a straight, sterile canal.
The salmon stripping operation surely didn’t do any good for the salmon run either, Chaffee said. For many years, each fall the Fish and Game Department operated a salmon stripping operation in the Before Hole. Fish and Game workers captured the fish, both male and female, in big nets, and squeezed out their eggs and sperm. Although he can’t prove it, Chaffee had little doubt that the state and its operation on the river played a sizeable role in the destruction of the salmon run.
“I’m afraid it killed a lot of salmon,” he said. Having worked at the operation for three or four years as a part-time Fish and Game employee, Chaffee had a unique perspective on the stripping operations on both the Clyde River and the Johns River in Derby. Whereas the focus of the operation on the Clyde was on salmon, the operation on the Johns River was more interested in the brown trout. Some of the brown trout, which also migrated up from Lake Memphremagog, weighed 10 pounds, the Derby man recalled.
Chaffee was thrilled to have the opportunity to watch a 12-minute long movie that the Fish and Wildlife Department produced sometime between 1938 and 1942, showing the fishing on the railroad bridge and the stripping operation. The movie brought back many fond memories for him, along with memories of long deceased friends with whom he worked.
The movie had no sound, but that was no problem because Chaffee’s sharp memory allowed him to narrate the entire movie, especially the segment that showed the stripping operation.
His eyes lit up as the old movie progressed showing the old wooden shack where supplies were stored and the large wooden pens in the river where fish were kept after being caught.
He quickly recognized two of the several workers in the movie as they strung a huge net across the river to capture the fish. He said he was certain he recognized Allie Potter, head of the operation, and former Clyde Street resident Raymond Flanders.
The men strained under the weight of the trapped fish as they pulled the net in, but once near shore the large, trapped salmon became visible. Chaffee said that while working at the operation, a lot of large salmon were caught. Probably the biggest weighed 14 pounds. He added that workers wore cloth work gloves over a pair of rubber gloves. The tips of the cloth gloves were cut away. The cloth gloves helped the workers to better handle the slippery fish, while the rubber gloves kept the cold, and sometimes icy water from their skin.
Once the net was towed to shore, the fish were picked from the net one at a time. The females were checked to see if their eggs were ripe. If they weren’t, the fish were put in the wooden pens. Males were also put in the pens.
“We’d put the females in one pen and the males in another.” Chaffee said.
The fish in the pens were routinely examined to see if the eggs were ripe and the fish were ready to spawn. They might be in the pens for a couple of days or up to a week or two, he said. When the eggs were ripe he and the other workers netted the fish from the pens one at a time and brought them to Mr. Potter who did most of the actual stripping.
Using a stroking motion, Potter stroked the eggs out of each salmon into a wooden bowl filled with water. The procedure was clearly shown in the movie. A male fish was then captured from one of the pens and Mr. Potter appeared to follow the same procedure to squeeze the sperm from the fish into the bowl full of eggs. Swirling the mixture, it was then placed in covered metal containers.
Although Chaffee said he never saw any of the fish die after being stripped, he speculated that some died later from internal injuries caused by being squeezed. The fish also suffered open wounds while in captivity. In an attempt to escape from the pens they banged their noses up against the wooden pens, tearing the skin from their noses. He couldn’t help but wonder how many of those wounds became infected, and how many died from the infection.
Even more troubling to Chaffee was his understanding that few, if any, of the fry hatched from the eggs ever made their way back to the river. Instead, he believed they ended up in other Vermont lakes and streams, and some were sold to Maine.
“Today I wouldn’t help them,” Chaffee said, referring to his stint in the Fish and Game Department. “I think it killed a lot of fish.” On the other hand, being the 1930s, and money being scarce, he said he had to do what he could do to bring in money to survive.
“I didn’t make much money. I’d get a few dollars. In them days you’d do anything to get a dollar.”
Moving from the area to join the military, which included a tour of duty in World War II, Chaffee didn’t live in the area during the days when the walleye ruled the river, between the 1940s and 1980s, so he had few memories of this period of the river’s history. Following his stint in the military, he lived in Connecticut from 1953 to 1983, before returning to Vermont. The walleye run continues to this day but in a much lesser degree. No longer do their numbers fill the river literally to the point of overflowing.
Not all the news is bad for the salmon fishermen of today, Chaffee said. It appears that the state’s stocking operation and a more consistent water flow in the river, is starting to pay off. More salmon are being caught. His son Ron has now replaced him on the riverbanks. The senior Chaffee boasts of his son’s fishing prowess. Ron is known as one of the best, and most humble, salmon fishermen in the region. One recent spring he caught 52 salmon, most of which were put back in the river to be caught another day. That’s probably more salmon than any one fisherman ever caught in one year during the days of the big salmon run, the elder Chaffee said. To the best of his recollection, a good year for him back in those days constituted catching 15 to 20 salmon. There is real hope for the salmon, Dick Chaffee concluded, but only if people don’t make the same mistakes that were made in the past.
Chaffee has now moved on to better fishing grounds, but there is little doubt that when his son Ron slips on his fishing boots, and makes that first cast of the year into the Clyde, he’ll be there beside his son when he catches his first salmon of the season.
Rest in peace, Dick
More Stories
If you like what you see here, take a moment to subscribe to Vermont's Northland Journal |
. 