Smoked Herring?
One possible explanation for the unidentified building on Chantry Island is that it was built as a smokehouse for preserving fish and possibly other meats. Some features of the building seem to suggest that this may have been its original purpose. At least two lightkeepers, Duncan McGregor Lambert (keeper from 1858 to 1880), and his son William McGregor Lambert (keeper from 1880 to 1907), generated extra income by fishing. Excerpts from William Lambert’s diary published in The Light on Chantry Island (Weeks-Mifflin and Mifflin 1986:40-41) contain several references to fish caught and “put up,” although no mention is made of smoking as the method of preservation:
October 12, 1881: “Caught 483 herring, first of season.”
November 7, 1882: “Caught 700 perch, net 400 feet long, set five hours at the pier.”
December 6, 1882: “Caught 45 packages herring.”
October 9, 1883: “Joseph Greathead came to work. Put up 60 packages herring.”
October 14, 1884: Walter Benny came to work. Put up 95 packages herring.”
The herring referred to are lake herring, or cisco, a fish commonly preserved by smoking. It is unknown whether or not the use of the word “packages” (as opposed to boxes or barrels) is significant: it may imply a semi-dry product like smoked fish.
In order to investigate the smokehouse possibility, research was conducted to find historical descriptions of such buildings. A literature search found that, while smokehouses are frequently mentioned in 19th- and early-20th-century popular literature, physical details were found only in books and articles dealing with food preservation, agricultural construction, and scientific/technical subjects. Fourteen descriptions of smokehouse designs, published between 1861 and 1930, are examined here, and compared to the Chantry Island structure (see table below). Since these descriptions are instructional in nature, recommending the best way to build a smokehouse, they can be considered variations on an “ideal smokehouse” concept. Small farmers, builders, and “do-it-yourselfers” consulting these books and articles would have likely used them as general guidelines, modifying the designs to suit budgets and materials on hand.
Four main elements of the unidentified building may point to it having been built as a smokehouse:
1. Stone construction: the building is well-constructed from both dressed limestone and natural lake cobbles. The walls are 20 inches thick, as is the case with the lightkeeper’s residence. While it may seem excessive to build a smokehouse to such high standards, the historical reference works often recommend stone, brick, concrete, concrete block, or hollow building tile for construction of either the lower portion or the entire building to provide fireproofing. If the dressed stone used in the building’s walls was left-over material from construction of the lighthouse and lightkeeper’s house, it would have been cost-free, along with the lake cobbles. The 20-inch thickness of the walls may be a function of the unreinforced masonry construction technique: walls that high may have to be that thick to be structurally sound.
2. Building dimensions: like the Chantry Island building, home smokehouses were generally fairly small, but were also fairly tall, to allow ample room for hanging meats and fish (see table below).
3. Possible air or flue hole: a small hole, roughly 6 in. square, penetrates the 20-inch masonry wall near ground level next to the door opening (see photograph here). Two main methods of smoke production were used in smokehouses: interior fires on the floor and exterior fires in a ground-level firepit, stove, or brick firebox. An interior fire would need a hole near the ground to admit combustion air, while exterior fires require a flue hole or channel of some sort to convey the smoke into the smokehouse. There is no obvious sign of an exterior firepit, so it seems as though, if this was indeed a smokehouse, it was likely to have been the interior-fire type. Another possibility is that an exterior firepit or box may exist and is just not apparent (see historical illustrations here).
4. Interior grid of poles: the building on Chantry Island had a three-level grid of wood poles inside. Various arrangements of poles or rods running across smokehouse interiors were commonly used for suspending the items to be smoked. An 1843 description of herring smoking on the Atlantic coast says the fish were “spitted, or strung upon small round sticks of three or four feet in length, and hung up in the smokehouse…They are placed, tier above tier, upon wooden fixtures supported by joists, until the house is full” (Davis 1843:66).
