ints of salt per
man.

A vivid picture of what the lack of salt entailed was given by
Cresswell in April 1777:

Saw a seine drawn for herrings and caught upwards of 40,000 with
about 300 shad fish. The shads they use but the herrings are left
upon the shore useless for want of salt. Such immense quantities of
this fish is left upon the shore to rot, I am surprised it does not
bring some epidemic disorder to the inhabitants by the nauseous
stench arising from such a mass of putrefaction.

A fishery by-product of importance to early Virginians, lime, was of
interest to Washington. It was extensively obtained by burning oyster
shells.

Early Virginia masonry shows that such lime was mixed in mortar and it
was usually of poor quality, perhaps because of crude facilities for
burning. Today's shell lime is much in demand in agriculture and its
price is higher than mined lime. George Washington found that for the
purpose of building it left much to be desired. He wrote to Henry Knox
from Mt. Vernon in 1785:

I use a great deal of lime every year, made of the oyster shells,
which, before they are burnt, cost me twenty-five to thirty
shillings per hundred bushels; but it is of mean quality, which
makes me desirous of trying stone lime.

He was paying about seven cents a bushel for shells, which seems high
for those days of abundant oysters and cheap labor. Until recently the
Virginia market price was very little more.

Washington's probing, weighing mind slighted no phase of his fishery.
About to fertilize crops with fish experimentally, he wrote to his
overseer: "If you tried both fresh and salt fish as a manure the
different aspects of them should be attended to." A few weeks later,
after watching results, he wrote: "The corn that is manured with fish,
though it does not appear to promise much at first, may nevertheless be
fine.... It is not only possible but highly probable."

This opinion was abundantly confirmed years later when vast quantities
of menhaden were converted into guano for crops by Atlantic coast
factories, a practice changed only when livestock-nutrition studies
showed that menhaden scrap was too valuable a protein source to be
spread on land. The fish referred to by Washington were in all
probability river-herring, or alewives, used as fertilizer at such
times as they were caught in greater abundance than the food market
could absorb.

The probable yield of