Although by now a good percentage of the hatchery staff are sick of looking at hatching jars full of fish eggs, I decided we ought to spend some time looking at one of the true relics of Fisheries Conservation: The Glass Hatching Jar. A few years ago while digging through the literature I came across a short article in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife newsletter "Eddies" from back in the Spring of 2010 in the section they called "From the Attic:Notes from the D.C. Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery and Archives" that dealt with the subject of glass hatching jars. They claimed to have over a dozen different styles in their collection. I wondered how many different ones I could find pictures of and information on; what were the different types named, and who designed them? Heck, if I was lucky maybe I could find where our hatcheries got the ones they used back in the day. If anybody has tried to google glass hatching jars, most likely you've been disappointed in the results: maybe a couple of photos of one or two types, most likely not named, and if you're lucky a paragraph on somebody's website about them being used at one time at a given hatchery. But if you go wayback in the dusty corners of the internet; Wayback in the dark corners of the archive websites, those old hatching jars are still alive and well.
But before we head back there and look at what I've found we need to take a quick look at where Iowa got some of its first glass hatching jars. The first record for the purchase of hatching jars I could find was April 1, 1882 up at the Spirit Lake Fish Hatchery for 4 hatching jars for $12.00 from "O.E. Chase". O. Chase was none other than Oren M Chase of Detroit, Michigan, the designer of the "Chase hatching jar" and while he worked for the Michigan Fish Commission his family owned a glass blowing factory in Detroit. That comes in handy when you want to design a new type of hatching jar (US patent #245,704 August 16,1881). Evidently, we must have liked the new hatching jars because there were several more purchases of Chase hatching jars throughout the late 1880's. The last purchase was from Edward Chase, the "E" of O.E. Chase, Oren's son, in April 1889 for 10 hatching jars for $25.00 and while it looks like we were getting the "friends and family" discount by that time, we had to pay the U.S. Express Company $12.20 for the shipping of the jars to Spirit Lake. Shipping gets you everytime! Later a big purchase of hatching jars was made by Spirit Lake in 1916 when they purchased 200 new jars to fill out their new 270 jar hatching battery. The biennial report doesn't have how much they cost or what type they were but from the old photographs of the battery I would say that they were "Downing hatchery jars".
Why did they quit making glass hatchery jars? Simple, during World War II, the glass companies quit making them to turn their manufacturing capacity to the war effort and they just didn't go back to making them after the War. There just wasn't the money in it. The first plastic hatching jars were designed up in Minnesota by John Dobie of their Fisheries Research Unit in the early 1950's. His design looks very much like what is used at Rathbun today. An article from the 1953 Progressive Fish-Culturist covering plastic hatching jars is on page 15 of my "catalog". Don't worry, including two pages of references the catalog is only 17 pages and is mostly pictures.
And now let's head back to that dusty corner of the wayback and see what I found (see attached).
