In the 1850s, the Shiverick boatyard in Dennis was building some of the greatest sailing vessels ever to crisscross the globe, but men like Prince Crowell and Asa Shiverick had a problem:
Their clippers left here full of cargo, but had a hard time rousting commodities to bring home from China and the South Pacific. An empty return is not a profitable prospect.
They came up with a shocking solution:
Load ships with guano, hardened bird dung, to be transformed into fertilizer farmers would love to buy.
The Howland Islands, near the Pacific equator, had as much as 200 feet of guano coating uninhabited rocks; birds had been depositing about 6 feet every 100 years (OK I’ll do the math; that’s about 3000 years).
Supply aplenty, but these capitalists needed to be sure they could control it. So they marshaled considerable political clout, proof in a bill passed by Congress and signed into law, “The Guano Act of 1856.”
When it comes to special interest legislation, you can’t do better than this:
Quote: “That when any citizen or citizens of the United States may have discovered or shall hereafter discover, a deposit of guano on any island, rock or key not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and shall take peaceable possession thereof, and occupy the same, said island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President of the United States, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”
Game on.
To be profitable guano needed to be processed, mixed with other ingredients, and pulverized into fertilizer.
So in 1859, Crowell and Shiverick created the Pacific Guano Company, with a major industrial production site in Woods Hole.
Clippers weren’t the only offloading boats. Sicilian barques imported brimstone. German ships carried potash salt. Chileans arrived with nitrate of soda. Local fishermen added bone from schools of menhaden.
Giant lead-lined vats held acidic brews that evaporated and hardened again in sunlight under glass roofs. Wharves, dormitories, warehouses, created an industrialized waterfront.
By the mid-1860s more than half a million tons of fertilizer had been shipped, 500 men on payroll at the zenith. Woods Hole’s first railroad, to move guano as much as people, opened by 1872.
This economic benefit must explain why Woods Hole put up with an outrageously noxious operation. Pulverized guano, fish carcasses, phosphate and sulfuric acid — a stench often hovered over the village.
That didn’t diminish the company’s stature. At the nation’s 1876 centennial celebration in Philadelphia, organizers lobbied Pacific Guano to attend. The company created an Oriental pavilion to acknowledge Far East connections.
Pacific Guano prospered for 30 years, but in 1889 rumors rocked Wall Street; a hard and fast collapse ensued. Suspicions of embezzlement never were disproven.
The operation shuttered. The sprawling plant vanished, replaced by one of the toniest gated communities on Cape Cod, Penzance Point. In 2020, one Penzance property sold for $20 million.
This peninsula has evolved in myriad ways, time erasing much of what people thought was permanent.
This might be the best example.
