Penobscot Marine Museum Exhibit Honors a Vanished Past

A new exhibit called “Sardineland” opened at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport in May. The year-long exhibit honors the state’s vanished sardine industry which provided the economic foundation for many small coastal communities for more than a century.

Packing sardines at the R.J Peacock plant in Lubec, 1941. Lubec Historical Society.

For many decades in Maine, sardines equaled money. The nation’s first sardine cannery opened in Eastport in 1875. Fishermen harvested coastal and offshore herring for the canneries and men, women and children worked in the plants when the fish were in. Maine once had 89 canneries operating in harbors large and small throughout the coast, employing approximately 8,000 people.

One part of the Museum’s exhibit depicts herring fishing vessels, such as the famous Jacob Pike, and fishing techniques, such as the vacuum hose that ships used to remove herring from nets. Another part focuses on canning, including a display wall showing the evolution of sardine cans over the decades. 

Museum researchers also gathered stories from those who worked in the canneries or fished for herring. “Sardineland” shares their experiences through artifacts, photographs, videos, and interactive activities, giving museum visitors an opportunity to experience the processes that made Maine a center for the sardine trade for well over a century.

Maine’s plants produced a huge volume of sardines, marketed with various colorful labels. During World Wars I and II, many of those cans were sent to feed the troops in Europe.

But with the advent of fast-food chains and a slow but steady shift in American eating habits, sardines eventually fell out of favor as a common food. The oily fish remained a preferred bait among lobstermen and for export to other countries, however. During the 1960s and 1970s, New England fishermen and foreign herring vessels fished the region’s vast herring schools hard.

By the 1980s, sardines were no longer the economic driver of the Maine coast. The last sardine cannery in the state closed in 2010, when Bumble Bee Foods closed the Stinson cannery in Prospect Harbor.

As one Lubec resident, interviewed for the exhibit, said, “It was quite something when the sardine factories closed. And it wasn’t just that. It was the boats. It was the weirs. It was everything. Because we were all so connected.”