From Out of the Past - Part VI

          The decades after the Civil War are often referred to as the Gilded Age« – an era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States.  It was during the Gilded Age that the modern industrial economy was created.  The 1870s and 1880s saw the U.S. economy grew at the fastest rate in its history.  Wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all rapidly increased.  A national transportation system and a sophisticated communications network were created.  Big corporations rose and prospered and a managerial revolution effectively transformed business operations.  By the time the 20th century rolled around, per capita income and industrial production in the United States led the world.  Towns and cities grew and expanded, new factories were built across the country, and employment soared. 
          At the same time, this was also an era of agricultural expansion.  Larger tracts of land were cleared and made ready for farming.  Farmers became more diversified as farming methods improved.  Crop yields increased as science played more of a role in the burgeoning business of agriculture.  In order to “power” these farming operations, the need for a cheap source of fertilizer became paramount.  As a result, the creation of fertilizer factories, specifically in the Delaware Bay region, escalated.  Horseshoe crabs had always been used (for generations) as a cheap and easily-obtainable source of fertilizer.  But now, there was an immediate need to supply farmers with a product that was both inexpensive as well as easily available.
          Crabs seemed to be a logical choice.
          Initially, horseshoe crabs were collected by hand from beaches during the spawning season.  Large “armies” of workers would scour the beaches along the Delaware Bay picking up crabs and tossing them into wagons for transportation to large wooden bins constructed along the shore.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of crabs would be piled into the bins creating, as you might imagine, a stench that would hang in the air for quite some time.  The harvesting of crabs was limited to the amount of crabs that could be collected manually.

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« The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).  The name refers to the process of gilding an object with a superficial layer of gold and is meant to make fun of ostentatious display while playing on the term “golden age.”