Audrey Wyman, Smokey Schools, and Everett Nack shad fishing on the Hudson River off Germantown
Archival pigment photograph, 17" x 22", Framed, © Joseph Squillante, 1994
Artist: Joseph Squillante

Everett Nack (1928-2004) was a commercial fisherman, activist and ardent environmentalist who lobbied Albany in order to protect the declining shad population of the Hudson. Everett began fishing for shad when he got out of the service in 1953.

Shad fishing is one of the oldest traditional industries along the North American coast and was practiced by both Native American and European settlers.

A print of this photograph was exhibited at the New-York Historical Society's Hudson Rising in 2019. It is now in their permanent collection.

Everett Nack, Hudson River Fisherman/advocate (1928-2004)

If you wanted to know the state of the Hudson River, especially between Poughkeepsie to just past south of Albany, all you needed to do was ask commercial fisherman Everett Nack, a vocal supporter of his beloved river.

A modern-day Davy Crockett, Nack lived close to nature. Besides fishing, he sold bait, smoked his own shad, hunted, trapped, bred dogs, made wine from berries, and whittled ducks out of wood. And like Crockett, Nack got involved in trying to protect the habitat that provided for him.

As a longtime member of an advisory committee to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, however, he said that the only thing he and other fishermen had been able to do was keep the state from regulating them off the river. "We haven't been able to improve a thing," he had said back in 1993. "The state just shrugs its shoulders." Meanwhile, he claimed, "the river is dying." He attributed the decline, ironically, to the river being "too clean" due to the sewage treatment plants above Poughkeepsie that release chlorine into the river to make it pure for drinking. "But they sterilized the river with the chemical, and the (fish) reproduction stopped and the fish all disappeared." Everett had noticed a dramatic decline in fish populations beginning in 1982. In earlier days, he'd pull up 300 to 500 pounds of fish in each net. "Now we see 3 to 5 fish," he had said.

It was rainy that spring day in 1994 when I first went fishing with Everett and his friends Audrey Wyman and Smokey Schools near Everett's hometown of Claverack. I was thrilled to join this respected riverman during the important, but short, shad season known as the lilac run.

Though my purpose was to photograph the remnants of a dying industry, I was impressed when multiple fish were caught in one haul. I had never before fished with a net. We caught perhaps 100 shad that day, and I was excited to go home with a large roe shad in each hand. Everett was less than satisfied. Hauls weren't what they used to be.

"In the late '70s, we used to run around 55 to 65 tons of shad, my sons and I." But in 1994 they caught only 8 tons among them. "Worst year in 20 years."

Everything in the river is disappearing," Everett had said. "If it was one species, you could say, 'Well, maybe it had a bad hatching season.' But, unfortunately, that's not the case."

Everett didn't have much hope for a reversal of the trend; he thought the future of the Hudson River commercial fishing looked dim. When he started fishing the river in 1953, after he got out of the service, there were 250 fishermen-and all kinds of fish-in the Hudson. By 1994 there were 35. "There's nothing to catch, so everybody's given up."

Joseph Squillante has been photographing the Hudson River for over 40 years from its source at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks to its mouth at New York Harbor.

hudsonriverphotography.com