The foundational Mass. fish story

The Sacred Cod is a four-foot eleven-inch carved-wood effigy of an Atlantic codfish, "painted to the life", hanging in the Massachusetts House of Representatives chamber of Boston's Massachusetts State House‍—‌ "a memorial of the importance of the Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth" — in its first 200 years.

“As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.’’

— Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943), poet, short story writer and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War John Brown's Body (1928), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and for the short stories "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1936) and "By the Waters of Babylon" (1937). He’s buried in Stonington, Conn., where he owned an historic house.