Rhode Island Division of Fish and Game (MsG. 28)

Historical Note

The records of the Rhode Island Division of Fish and Game, formerly stored in the Wickford Hatchery and removed to URI in 1976, comprise the records not only of the office but also of the three agencies which at one time fulfilled essentially the same duties. In 1935 the Division of Fish and Game was created to consolidate and replace the Commissioners of Shell Fisheries (established in 1844), the Commissioners of Inland Fisheries (established in 1870),and the Commissioners of Birds (established in 1899). In 1965 the Division of Fish and Game was itself superseded by the Division of Conservation (of which there are no records in the present collection).

The records of each of the three early agencies are grouped in separate series, with the Division of Fish and Game making up a fourth series. Materials which span the years surrounding 1935 are crossed-referenced between the Division of Fish and Game and the agency which initiated them. Within each series the the materials are arranged in four basic categories. 1) Financial Records, which include all formal and informal materials having to do with the fiscal operation of the agencies; 2) Business Records, which include all materials–minutes, correspondence, licenses, applications, reports of arrest, and so on–having to do with the normal transaction of each agencies functions; 3) Published Matter, which includes not only such formal publications as annual reports, but also new clippings, reprints of research brochures, and other related items, along with lecture notes and texts of addresses; and 4) Appended Materials, which include maps and charts, plats, photographs and glass negatives, blueprints, and one shell.

The largest, most important, and probably most complete body of materials is found under the COMMISSIONERS OF SHELL FISHERIES (Series I), who had responsibility for controlling the oyster industry in Narragansett Bay. The plats date from the founding of the agency in 1844, and there are legal advertisements for oyster ground leases dating form the 1860’s onward. The bulk of material dates from approximately 1913 to 1935. The business materials include applications for, registration, or applications for cancellation of private filing companies’ leases of oyster grounds in Narragansett Bay. A considerable quantity of material, however, is concerned with the proper surveying of the locations of the oyster beds themselves, that is to say, with the geographical coordinates of all the oyster grounds under cultivation, as determined by sightings from triangulation stations, and with precise identification of triangulation stations themselves. (The mounted map noted under folder 64 serves as an index to the individual station locations found in folder 58-63.)

Series I also contains a good deal of geographical information about Narraganset Bay, from Providence to Jamestown. The Shell Fisheries records provide data concerning the rise, progress, and decline of the oystering industry in the region. In particular, the applications of cancellation of leases, with their required reasons for cancellation, supply insight into the recurring battle against natural and man made enemies of the industry, that is, both starfish and pollution, the latter chiefly in the form of sewage from the Providence urban area. It is quite likely that these sources may provide considerable information about marine pollution, showing, for example, that the sewage problem in the upper bay seems to have reached something like crisis proportions in the second half of the second decade in this century. They also raise some curious mysteries, such as why, in the annual maps of leased grounds (Folder 72), the gradual contraction of the cultivated areas of the bay should seem to have moved from the south northward; it appears that the grounds have fallen earlier into disuse from the ocean end rather than from the urban end of the bay.

The records of the COMMISSIONERS OF INLAND FISHERIES (Series II), besides containing the financial ledgers for late years of the agency’s administration in the State House and at the Wickford and Goose Nest Spring Hatcheries, also include two letterpress copy books, covering the years 1896 to 1912, of the secretary if the commissioners, William Morton. There is also a reasonably filled sequence of published annual reports of the Commissioners, accounting for the years 1904, 1910-14, 1916-18, 1920-21, 1923, 1925-29, and 1934. A large and heterogeneous collection of glass plate negatives exposed by Phil B. Hadley of Brown University in 1903-1905 contains numerous specimen views of marine fauna and flora, some in detail, as well as views of the old Wickford Hatchery, its equipment, and its environs in the Wickford Cove.

Series III, of the COMMISSIONERS OF BIRDS, seems chiefly to be the records of one of the five Commissioners, Mr. Everett Barrus. some of the material dates from 1913 (fourteen years after the inception of the agency) but the bulk of it comes from 1920 onward. One of the most interesting features of this portion of the records is the body of reports, often quite casual reports, by the Deputy Commissioners (game wardens, in effect) of the arrests they had made for violation of game laws; a study of the ages and ethnic backgrounds those arrested could yield insight into some of the difficulties of acculturation met by young Italians and Portuguese immigrants to Rhode Island.

THE RHODE ISLAND DIVISION OF FISH AND GAME (series IV) continued most of the activities of the three earlier agencies, but the records preserved here seem quite miscellaneous, with certainly the greater part of them lacking. What remains seems to have been preserved rather by chance than by design, and besides reasonably complete financial records from 1935 to 1949, the rest appears only to be representative of the divisions wide range of activities. There are some materials on licenses of various kinds from the late 1930’s, and a sheaf of correspondence with assorted town clerks throughout Rhode Island (1937-38) regarding their compliance with the regulations for issuing and reporting game licenses. Annual reports are present from the Division Fish and Game for the years 1935-41, 1945, and 1962, and from its parent body, the Rhode Island Department of Agriculture and Conservation, for the years 1936, 1939, 1941, 1943-44.