Ellen:     I can't imagine what it was like they plowed lobster into the ground to make it fertile enough to grow potatoes. Obviously there were lots of fish and that, but it must have been a pretty tough life. Of course lobster you couldn't get to market in the winter anyway. It must have been a very difficult life and all settlement were difficult to live in.

Tony:     But lobster didn't really have high price on it anyway like these day's.

Ellen:     No, the only things that had high prices were the things that the fisherman needed. By the time the wives finished doing business in Halifax, they owed them the island. He would get all of their fish and everything and they'd get their supplies from him.

Tony:      Quite a monopoly

Ellen:      All businesses had monopolies in those day's. The company's stole from the coalminers, anyone that provided and it's interesting how history gets written, what book was I reading, it may even be in that little book I gave you. And they described the American fisherman coming here with the two mile limit or whatever cleaning up on all our herring and whatever. And ah they describe that as a great boon for the place, and it was a boon for anyone who owned a shop or a bar room right but for the fisherman it was the beginning of the death knell so history gets you know, its all in the eye's of the beholder really.

Tony:     That's the way it often goes, yeah Joe Power was telling me yesterday that there were 6 stores down here

Ellen:     Stores, there were five bar rooms at one point. Imagine that...

Tony     Bowling alley and everything he said

Ellen:     Oh yes

Tony:     I can't picture that now

Ellen:     Well, a lot of land loss ok to the ocean, people have deeds for all kinds of lands, that doesn't exist anymore

Tony:     It's under the water

Ellen:     Cemetery's gone, one of our early cemeteries are gone. But there's that, then there's the fact that if you were using the land description size wise that were in the census, well Prospect encompasses a lot more then what we look at today in Prospect, you know god knows what they were calling Prospect ended up in Bayside. So we don't really know, I think it was the census of 1880 there were a lot of people on it and by the turn of the century only half as many or less.