Links to Bass Fishing History of the Northeast

I fished Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts with a Hampshire College economics professor. He caught a largemouth as big as mine, photographed here from Merrill Creek Reservoir in New Jersey, but never mailed me the photo I took of him with it. So I have no photos of New England bass. I quit Hampshire shortly after we fished.

onthewater.com 1 

onthewater.com 2 A couple of articles from On the Water, one on the history of largemouth bass in the Northeast, the other on the history in New England of black bass in general--largemouth and smallmouth. It wasn't until 1850 when Samuel Tisdale acquired 27 bass from Saratoga Lake in New York and put them in Flax Lake near Wareham, Massachusetts, that New England had any. 

Both of these articles are good reading for anyone interested in history. And any of us should at least know bass in the Northeast are not native, including here in New Jersey. 

I read James Alexander Henshall's The Book of the Black Bass years ago, but that book got published in 1881. The evidence On the Water presents is that the movement that amounted to making the black bass the nation's most beloved gamefish, which Henshall applauds, as I remember, was already well underway. 

I love the stories I read somewhere. Maybe in Henshall's book. Maybe elsewhere. About smallmouth bass loaded into stream locomotive water tanks in the Midwest and driven by rail to the Northeast, where, I believe, the trains would stop on bridges over rivers and throw bass into the water below. 

How many years have bass occupied the Raritan system? We probably will never know...

Nice One