October 31, 2025 — For more than 150 years, North Carolina fishermen have been using pound nets. Gaither Midgette is among those keeping the fishery going.
Before the Civil War, the American shad fishery in the South was dominated by aristocrats, including George Washington. Plantation owners with deep pockets invested what would be millions of dollars today into the gear and infrastructure needed to harvest shad with haul seines of 2,000 yards or more. They depleted the resource, and during the Civil War in North Carolina, the Union Army destroyed most of the boats, nets, and buildings needed for the haul seine fishery. In 1863, North Carolina outlawed the fishery for the duration of the war in order to keep shad from being commandeered by, or sold to, Union Army commissaries.
The pause in the harvest during the war led to rebounding stocks, and in 1869, the Hattrick brothers brought the pound net to North Carolina. Pound nets required a much smaller investment and provided a higher return than haul seines. A few haul seine operations remained, but increasingly, the shad fishery belonged to the common people. In addition, the pound nets often caught higher-value species at a time when ice was introduced to preserve the catch, and those fish could be shipped to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.
Over a hundred years later, the shad fishery has shrunk to almost nothing, but small-scale fishermen are still working the pound nets in Pamlico, Albemarle, and Croatan Sounds, and Gaither Midgette of Wanchese is among them. At 5:30 on a warm August morning, he fires up the 30-HP Honda 4-stroke on his pound skiff, a 20-foot by 6-foot wooden boat planked crossways on its flat bottom. “It’s all juniper-planked,” says Midgette. “The sides are all juniper, too. Glen Bradley built it about 20 years ago.” He steers down the canal from Spencer Yachts to the open water of Croatan Sound, between Roanoke Island and the mainland. “It won’t take too long. We’ll be finished by 7:30,” he says.