Work in Lewes in 1915 meant fishing for menhaden

More in the spirit of the Labor Day holiday: In 1915 when this postcard was mailed, hundreds of people in the Lewes area worked in the menhaden fishery based out of Lewes. They earned wages for their families by performing a wide variety of jobs including driving trucks, shoveling fish meal, constructing facilities, and pulling nets filled with fish into the kinds of steamers shown here at the docks along Delaware Bay. They also kept accounting books, swept warehouses, painted buildings, captained the ships and fed the crews.  All of that work fueled an industry that produced fertilizer from fish meal and oil used in everything from lipstick to linoleum.  It was all honorable work from another era; the kind of work - among thousands of other kinds of work - celebrated by the Labor Day holiday.