The Herring Party is Over

This story originally ran in The Food Section, which is an Assembly partner.

Small fish can have a big impact.

For thousands of winters, Atlantic herring coursed through the rivers of what is now North Carolina and Virginia, so abundant that locals could catch them by the bucketful to feed their families. As author and historian David Cecelski illustrates in the “Herring Week” series on his website, 19th-century fisheries set up mile-long seine nets on the tributaries of the Albemarle Sound, where men and women labored day and night to catch, cut, and salt hundreds of thousands of fish a season—so many herring that the surplus was sold as fertilizer.

That kind of bustling scene is a thing of the past on the quiet banks of the Roanoke River. Between dam construction, overfishing, and environmental degradation, river herring populations declined drastically in the late 20th century, and tributaries that once teemed with herring no longer support thousands of spawning fish. What’s more, since 2006 in North Carolina, and 2012 in Virginia, it has been illegal to fish for river herring, even for recreational purposes.

“It used to be a joyous thing,” Cecelski says. “But this is the first time in probably 10,000 years that you can’t catch a herring in a North Carolina river.”

A defining part of life in the region for centuries, the culture of herring fishing is now poised to disappear, even in the towns most closely connected to the tradition.

Jamesville, North Carolina, a small, quiet town on the Roanoke River, had long been home to the North Carolina Herring Festival. Since 1949, the Easter weekend event celebrated the spawning season with vendors, rides, live music, and a massive herring fry-up. Yet the herring festival in Jamesville came to an end in 2024. Chatter about pivots and consultants notwithstanding, it shows no sign of returning.

Locals look back at the Herring Festival with fond nostalgia, remembering it as a chance for the community to bond over shared history and food.

“It used to be everybody just came to Jamesville on Easter Monday, and they ate herrings, and they’d hang around, and they’d see their friends, and we’d have

some vendors that would come every now and then,” said Jim Williams, a Jamesville native who served on the town’s board of commissioners.

As the years went on, the festival continued to grow, both as a community event and tourist attraction. At its peak, the event drew close to 6,000 visitors—about 10 times as many people as live in the town itself. In 2011, the North Carolina state legislature designated the celebration as the state’s official herring festival.

“It gives a lot more credence to what you’re doing when you get the North Carolina seal of approval,” Williams said.

But soon after the event celebrated its 70th birthday, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the festival in 2020 and 2021. A lack of volunteers forced its cancellation in 2022, as well. A small group of locals got together to revive the festival in 2023, but the event hit some unforeseen complications.

Former town commissioner Carolyn Martin, who helped organize the 2023 festival, said problems with the event’s regular ride contractor led to last-minute chaos.

“The fellow who had the company that had promised us the rides—which are the draw to get kids here, which gets parents here—brought like two rides,” she said. “I mean, he completely failed on what he had promised. The town scrambled and found a bouncy house or something to put up themselves, but it was kind of an epic fail.” 

Somehow, the town still managed to break even on the event, but it overwhelmed the already-overworked municipal government.

“The Herring Festival committee was maybe six, eight people. They can’t run the parade and keep the booths running on their own,” Martin said. 

Town commissioner Rachel Craddock, who served as festival director, estimated that the event required 20-30 volunteers to be a success. In a town board meeting, she made it clear that unless participation went up, the festival couldn’t go on. “No volunteers, no festival,” she said at a Jamesville Board of Commissioners meeting, to which her fellow commissioners unanimously agreed.

Jamesville’s demographics have made it difficult to find those necessary volunteers. The town’s population sits at around 500, and as business has left the area, it has transitioned into an older community.

Despite the challenges, there’s still interest in holding the festival in Jamesville. The town has explored holding smaller herring-centric events or even enlisting an external event-planning organization to help run the festival.

“I don’t know of anybody right now that’s willing to take it over. But it might could be done,” Williams says. “There are companies out there that will come and run a festival like that for you.”

The idea of outsourcing a cherished community event might seem strange to some, but sometimes that’s the only way to sustain a tradition—especially a fish-based one—in a changing modern world.

Despite the ban on harvesting herring, the fish remains on the region’s menus. Throughout coastal Carolina and Virginia, restaurants still offer breakfast platters of cornmeal-dredged saltfish with potatoes and corn pancakes on winter mornings, the way they have for decades. They just have to source their ingredients from further afield.

River’s Edge, Jamesville’s remaining herring restaurant, gets its fish from South Carolina, where river fishing is still legal. Despite being located on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, Lafayette Diner, which has offered herring breakfast since the 1970s, has to use a distributor for its herring. And the herring breakfast I grew up eating at Holland’s Country Gourmet in Suffolk, Virginia, is made with salt filets from China.

This isn’t to say that any of these places have “sold out” to Big Industrial Herring: Laverne Bower, owner of Lafayette Diner, had to cut our call short so she could use the phone line to run a customer’s credit card.

“Sorry, we’re a bit old-school like that,” she said.

Herring became the backbone of towns like Jamesville because it was a cheap, plentiful local resource. In 2025, though, herring isn’t a convenient food source anymore, especially when you’re more likely to catch a charge than a fish if you source them from the river. Communities do what they can to sustain their traditions, but without changes to laws governing recreational herring fishing, the longstanding connection between people and fish is at risk.

Williams hopes for a future in which he can fish for herring in the Roanoke River but concedes it doesn’t seem likely. “They just basically cut it off altogether, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see it come back,” he said.

Losing the festival has been a blow for Jamesville, but it’s not the vendors, the rides, or the herring-themed t-shirts that Williams misses the most. Instead, it’s the fish themselves that he looks back on most fondly.  

“I certainly would like an opportunity to go out there and catch eight or 10,” he said. Then, he would “take [them] home and feed my family.”

Henry Luzzatto is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. Originally from Suffolk, Virginia, his fiction, nonfiction, and opinion writing is featured in Radon Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Suffolk News-Herald, among others. He is a fan of herring, but acknowledges that it’s an acquired taste.