June 28, 2012 – Caviar, salted sturgeon eggs, is a delicacy most often associated with Russia … the “treat of tsars.” New Jerseyans may be surprised, then, to learn that this state we’re in was once world-famous for its own caviar.
In the late 1800s, the Delaware Bay and Delaware River were one of the planet’s most productive sturgeon fisheries, helping make the United States the world’s top caviar exporter.
The Delaware Bay even had its own sturgeon boomtown at the mouth of the Stow Creek in Cumberland County, known as Caviar Point or sometimes simply Caviar.
Caviar had a processing plant and its own railroad spur for sending the delicacy north through the Pine Barrens to New York City. At its peak around 1895, nearly two dozen wholesalers shipped 15 train cars of caviar and smoked sturgeon every day.
Atlantic sturgeon were huge and plentiful. Gigantic females were slaughtered to extract the eggs. But demand for caviar exceeded the Delaware Bay’s supply of the slow-maturing Atlantic sturgeon. The caviar business eventually crashed in the early 1900s due to overfishing; newspaper stories from the time indicate that Caviar residents thought they were being punished by God. Without its namesake business, Caviar became known as Bayside.
Read the full story at NJToday.net.