No herring fishery in NC any more. Just about all of them come from SC. When I was a kid my mom's side of the family would get together at Pitch Kettle close to New Bern, NC. We would have NC fish stew made from what they called rockfish but were striped bass. We fried herring and ate them with white bread. At the end of the day my uncles Chevy truck was still full of herring and we would take them to all of the farm workers houses. They would come out with wheel barrows and we would scoop them out of the truck bed and into the wheel barrows with a grain shovel. There were a bunch of canneries on the rivers and creeks back then. Folks also did salt herring and the local stores had those for sale in five gallon buckets. They were over fished in their spawning grounds as were the striped bass. Add in the ocean fishing and you not only have a death of an industry but an almost demise of two species.
