Albert and Fred Bjorkquist. Courtesy photo.
By Stewart A. McFerran
If there was ever a plucky crew of entrepreneurs struggling to build a business and support their families, it was the Bjorkquist brothers of Manistee. In his recently completed manuscript, Dennis Bjorkquist, with the help of students at West Shore Community College in Scottville, highlights the hard work of his grandfather, who built the Bjorkquist Brothers – a fishing company that endured for almost 100 years along Fifth Avenue in Manistee.
Bjorkquist said he wrote his family’s story so that future generations of family members would understand how hard their ancestors worked to carve out a life in this Michigan port city.
The Bjorkquists’ early fishing years
Gill nets were one of the standard tools of the fishing trade for the 100 years the Bjorkquists fished, and 100 years before that. Albert Bjorkquist, a native of Siipyy, Finland, arrived in America in 1891. He followed his brother Fred to Manistee, Michigan. He set his gill nets from his sailboat, the Cape Pigeon, on the Arcadia Reef. At that time, Albert was a newcomer to the established commercial fishing industry that was already shipping thousands of barrels of whitefish and lake trout to hungry customers in Detroit and Chicago.
The catch was dressed and put on ice at the brothers’ operation on the north side of the river. The brothers built a shanty, where nets were mended, an icehouse and a smokehouse. They sold their catch right off the dock, as well as packing fish on ice inside boxes and barrels for wholesale.
In the ensuing years, other family members helped at the fishery and a new boat was built of oak on the bank of the Manistee River. The Bob Richard was 47 feet long and powered by a Kahlenberg marine internal combustion engine, an engine known at the time for its dependability. Albert continued to lift nets by hand until a mechanical lifter was installed on the port side of the vessel.
Declining Great Lakes native fish populations
The family often caught perch at the “rock pile,” but during spawning times they would not set gill nets nearby, thus ensuring more perch would be caught in the future.
Dennis Bjorkquist writes: “Albert firmly understood how important a strong fish population was to the success of his business.”
In “Fishing the Great Lakes”, Margaret B. Bouge writes: “The combination of refuse from sawmills, toxic residues from chemical plants, and waste fluids from pulp and paper mills further destroyed the quality of Great Lakes waters for fish life.”
Some speculate that those impoverished during the Great Depression also contributed to the demise of the big fish, as a lunker could feed a hungry family.
“Once the Lake Trout were all but decimated and the Chubs became the fish of choice for the Bjorkquist family, the workload greatly increased and intensified as well. Chubs were a much smaller fish which required gill nets with smaller openings. The smaller openings meant more knot tying and increased net repair.”
Because they were smaller, the chubs took more time to process than the larger lake trout. The smoked chubs were delicious but required a lot of hard work.
Dennis claims commercial fishers were blamed for ruining the fishery with their gill nets. He writes: “Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Department of Natural Resources became more regulatory.”
Restrictions regarding where the Bjorkquist Bros. could fish, what they could fish for, and how they could fish were piled on as the state engaged in social engineering.
“Late in the night, on June 23rd, 1981,” Dennis writes, “the Michigan Department of Natural Resources motored out to the nets that had been set by the Bjorkquist brothers the day before and confiscated them.”
The brothers filed a claim with the local court. The court ordered the DNR to return the nets.
The introduction of sport fish to the Great Lakes
The state had embarked on a quest to turn the big lakes into giant fish farms stocked with the kind of fish sportsmen like to catch. In the 1970s state hatcheries began churning out millions of Pacific salmon and releasing them into Great Lake waters. This scheme lured anglers to the big lakes. It was a boon for sportsmen but off limits to those entrepreneurs already established, such as the Bjorkquist Bros.
The state brushed aside the commercial fishing operations in the Great Lake states. The Bjorkquist Bros. fishery was collateral damage. Just this year (2020), the Michigan Legislature saw fit to further regulate and restrict commercial fishers in favor of sportsmen.
Gill nets are one method of fishing, among others in the tackle box. Gill nets can be misused in a way that can reduce fish populations, but industry and invasive species are arguably mostly to blame for the disappearance of native fish such as whitefish and chubs. Some would postulate that the predator fish that were dumped into Lake Michigan gobbled up the native fish in which the commercial fishery was based.
While sports fishing policy allows all to buy a license and engage in the activity of fishing, there is a place for commercial fish operations in the big lakes as well. Commercial fishers can provide fresh-caught fish for restaurants and groceries in a way sport fishers cannot. They can build businesses, as Albert Bjorkquist did. With the pressure of the heavy hand on them, the “Bjorkquist Bros.” went out of business in 1981.
Forty years later some might gaze north from the Riverwalk, across the mighty Manistee, remembering the old buildings and the delicious taste of the brothers’ locally caught, locally smoked chubs, now a distant memory.
