The park is unusual as far as state lands go in that it is on a former industrial site. The trail from a parking lot opposite Napeague Meadow Road winds past a number of rusted steel remnants of a long-gone menhaden processing works. Nearer to the beach, a series of narrowly spaced stone walls probably supported a massive boiler when the works were active.
The volume of fish rendered annually during the heyday of bunkering here is staggering. In 1887, nearly 95 million menhaden and sea robin were rendered at works on the East End, producing about 720,000 gallons of fish oil and 7,180 tons of dried guano from their bones and flesh. During the excellent 1894 season, The Star reported, 150 million fish were landed.
Sterling Oil Works was at Deep Hole off present-day Gerard Drive in Springs. Falcon Oil Works, Ranger Oil Works, Dixon Oil Works, and Ellsworth Tuthill & Co. were at Promised Land. Excelsior Oil Works was on Hicks Island at Napeague Harbor. The Dixon Works was destroyed in a storm in 1997, and it is possible that some of the metal and exposed wooden pilings visible at low tide date to that time.
During peak summer and fall operations each works and their associated vessels, called bunker steamers, employed as many as 100 men, many of whom were Black seamen up from coastal Virginia for the season. Pay was around $40 a month.
By 1940, the Smith Meal Company had bought up the earlier operations and was the sole bunker plant at Promised Land. It ceased processing fish by 1968. About 10 years later, New York State and the Department of the Interior paid $8.7 million for about 1,300 acres now called Napeague State Park.
Ticks or not, it is a lovely place to walk and think a bit about the people who once worked there. For me, it is a reminder of the impermanence of it all.