“Jake Wells, he was a bigshot,” Gus Pitts recalled in an oral history interview in 1984. “If you didn’t behave yourself, he’d have you chased off of the beach … You had to go under Jake Wells. Whatever Jake Wells said, you had to do.”
Capt. Jake Wells’s Montauk Fish and Supply Company was just west of E.B. Tuthill and Company — later Duryea’s– on the south side of the bay. The highly productive commercial fleet used his dock for handling fish and fueling up, and Wells sold crushed ice for boxing fish. He also had a grocery store and icehouses that stored ice harvested from Fort Pond.
“Jake Wells’s Dock was for us sort of an institution,” Paul T. Cook wrote in his book From Montauk To… “There was the dock for fish handling, fuel supply for the boats, crushed ice for boxing fish, a grocery store, kerosene for summer stoves and lanterns, a ‘punch board’ for taking chances on various prizes … and, of course, just across the tracks was Wells’s Ice House, which stored ice sawed out of Fort Pond during winter when this lake froze over.”
In winter, weather permitting, local men would pick up work with Capt. Wells or Capt. Tuthill harvesting ice from Fort Pond which would be stacked in their icehouses on the bay. Then, as warmer weather approached, the men would assemble fish boxes to ship the catch to the Fulton Fish Market.
“Every spring a freight train with loads of soft pine lumber arrived at the fishing village,” Paul Cook wrote. “Just before the fishing season several workers at Wells’ came to the big sand lot, between Ecker’s Trail’s End Restaurant and the Post Office, to set up for making hundreds of wooden boxes in which fish with crushed ice would be sent to the fish market in New York City. The somehow musical hammering of shiny 8 penny nails went on for many days for assembly of these fish boxes.”
In season Capt. Wells would buy live sea bass and other fish from the commercial fishermen, then keep them in nets in the bay until the price went up – sometimes as much as four times the original, according to Capt. Pitts. In Peg Winski’s book Montauk, Edna Biase recalled getting pinched by the lobsters Jake Wells kept when she went for a swim near his underwater pounds.
In a 1977 oral history interview, Carl Darenberg Sr. recalled getting caught when he and other kids snuck down to steal fish from Jake Wells’s traps. “He chased us off the dock all the time,” he said.
“Jake Wells was quite a character,” said Captain Darenberg. “A lot of people don’t know too much about him, but he was like a godfather to most of these people around here. He’d give them credit in the wintertime when they didn’t have any money and he’d give them supplies and he bought their fish in the summer… It was like people used to read about in the old Western things when people were always helping each other. ”
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