In this photograph from the State Archives, we see a crew of menhaden fishermen at work in the waters off Morehead City and Beaufort, N.C., in 1947. They have tied their purse boats up against the mother boat after making a set and are beginning to load their catch onto the mother boat.
African American fishermen
In the Galley of the Menhaden Boat Dewey
In the African American communities that were home to menhaden fishermen-- in Morehead City and Beaufort, in rural communities such as North River and Harlowe, and in fishing ports up and down the coast-- it seemed like everybody lost a loved one when the Parkins went down.
The Menhaden Boat C. P. Dey
In this unfortunately rather blemished photograph, we see the menhaden fishing boat C. P. Dey at the docks in Morehead City, N.C., looking well-used but tidy, her purse boats in good view, November 1942.
Working Lives: The Herring Fisheries at Plymouth, N.C., 1939
This is a special group of photographs that were taken on the Roanoke River, just west of Plymouth, N.C., in the spring of 1939. Now preserved at the State Archives in Raleigh, they show the last days of two of the oldest herring seine fisheries on the North Carolina coast.
13 Views of the Sea
When I was visiting my son in Washington, DC recently, I went to a breathtakingly beautiful exhibit of Katsushika Hokusai's paintings that is currently at the National Museum of Asian Art's Freer Gallery.
David Cecelski 