The First Ever Aerial Fish Stocking

Dennis Hartnett at Witchhopple Lake

Fishing for native trout was one of the primary reasons sportsmen flocked to the Beaver River Country in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Published reports from these fishing trips show that success was measured by the total number of trout killed. W.W. Hill, on a visit to the Beaver River in the summer of 1873, reported taking 88 trout in a single day while his daughter caught 66 the same day. In thirteen days of fishing, Hill proudly reported that he caught a total of 592 trout. Hill was not an exception. Fishing for sheer numbers of trout was the rule. On a trip to Crooked Lake in 1896 the six founders of the Rap-Shaw Club caught 163 brook trout weighing a total of 165 pounds in five hours of non-stop fishing. 

The number of brook trout seemed unlimited. Even after the state started regulating fishing late in the nineteenth century, sportsmen paid little attention to the rules and enforcement was essentially non-existent. Because they had no knowledge of fishery ecology, everyone seemed to be taken by surprise when the trout started to disappear from their favorite lakes and streams. 

From 1887 until 1939 the Rap-Shaw Fishing Club was located north of the Beaver River along the Red Horse Trail. Club members regularly fished the many lakes and ponds of this area. By the early 1920s even in this remote region fish stocks were in steep decline. It’s noteworthy that club members did not believe that they were the source of the problem. They thought that it was other, less conservation-minded sportsmen and poachers who were causing the decline. Even as they regaled others with stories of large catches in the old days, and even continued to take the occasional trout out of season, they remained blind to the inexorable effects of their own over-fishing. 

Rather than change the very practices that were causing the decline, they turned their attention to replenishing the supply through fish stocking. They were far from alone. Fish stocks were declining throughout the Adirondacks and all over the state. The problem was so wide-spread that New York established a state-supported fish stocking program in 1868. 

Only a few years earlier, in 1864, Seth Green established the first commercial fish hatchery in the western hemisphere at Caledonia near Rochester. Green was among those who strongly advocated for the State of New York to engage in fishing regulation and fish stocking. Green himself brought fish from his hatchery to stock the Fulton Chain in January 1872. This was probably the first recorded instance of Adirondack fish stocking and incidentally marked the introduction of smallmouth bass into Adirondack waters. 

New York State acquired Green’s hatchery in 1875, then began to construct other hatcheries throughout the state. The first Adirondack first hatchery, located near Saranac Inn, opened in 1885. A second hatchery at Cold Spring on Fourth Lake was constructed later the same year. In 1887, to insure a more reliable water supply, the Cold Spring hatchery was relocated to just below the dam in the village of Old Forge. 

At first, only native trout roe was collected and raised to fingerlings in the hatcheries. As time passed native fish were supplemented with brown and rainbow trout as well as a host of other non-native species. Fish fingerlings were usually transported from the hatchery to lakes and streams in five-gallon metal milk cans. The weight of these cans restricted where stocking could occur. Large-scale stocking could only take place in the reasonable vicinity of wagon roads or railroads. 

The state hatcheries provided fish fingerings for free on request but depended on private individuals, often sportsmen’s clubs, to do the actual fish planting. There is evidence that as early as 1912 Dave Conkey, the forest ranger at Beaver River, ordered fish fingerlings delivered by train from Old Forge to stock the Beaver River and near-by waters. Quite naturally, the Rap-Shaw Club members wanted to restock the lakes near their camp, but there was no road access. The trip to the club involved a train ride to Beaver River Station, a wagon ride to the Beaver River, then a series of boat crossings and hikes spanning eight long miles to the camp. 

In 1923 the Rap-Shaw Club board of directors sent a letter to the NYS Conservation Commission requesting the State stock trout in Walker, Clear and Little Rock Lakes, all of which were on the state Forest Preserve near their camp. The Conservation Commission did not act on the club’s request, so early that summer the club did some minimal stocking of chub and sunfish in Clear Lake. For the next eight years the club consistently lobbied the Conservation Commission with no success. In the meantime, the number of fish in their favorite lakes continued to decline. 

In 1931 Dennis E. Hartnett, a long-time Rap-Shaw Club member and fanatical fisherman, devised a solution to the fish transportation problem. He convinced fellow club members to allocate $150 to cover the cost of hiring a floatplane to fly the heavy cans to the remote lakes. Hartnett then arranged for early Adirondack aviator Merrill Phoenix to do the job. On August 8, 1932 Phoenix’s plane called at the state fish hatchery at Old Forge and picked up as many as twenty cans of fingerling trout at a time. Club members met the plane at the lakes near their camp and stood in the cold water up to their hips to temper the fingerlings before releasing them. Phoenix made seven flights that first year planting fish in lakes favored by club fishermen including Big Crooked, Willie, Walker and Clear Lakes. Hartnett was on the plane for several of the trips. Legend has it that when flying over Beaver River Station Hartnett dropped notes and dollar bills to the kids below in empty tomato cans.

The 1932 fish stocking, Phoenix and Hartnett on the pontoon

Word spread quickly that the club had successfully used an airplane for fish stocking. Articles praising the idea appeared in newspapers throughout the state and in national sporting magazines. The next summer Clarence Chamberlin, the famous barnstormer and trans-Atlantic flyer, visited the Rap-Shaw Club at Hartnett’s invitation to recognize the club’s contribution to aviation history. 

The Rap-Shaw Club continued annually stocking fish by floatplane through 1938. They stopped because in the late 1930s the Conservation Commission finally started to use airplanes for fish stocking throughout the Adirondacks but instead of landing floatplanes, they simply dumped fingerling fish from the air. Aerial fish stocking of remote waters is now routinely used, not only in the Adirondacks, but also throughout the world. It all started in 1932 with those seven floatplane flights in the backwoods of the Beaver River Country. 

An earlier version of this story was published by the Adirondack Almanack on May 31, 2017. https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2017/05/historic-firsts-aerial-fish-stocking-adirondack-waters.html 

All photos are from the Rap-Shaw Club archive.