“Sardines are in my blood,” said Ronnie Peabody, 53, director of Jonesport’s new Maine Coast Sardine History Museum. “I grew up hearing sardine carriers and factory whistles since the day I was born.”
Each of Jonesport’s then existing three sardine factories whistled to signal the change in shifts and the arrival of a load of herring to tell people to come to work. Each factory had four sardine carriers working area waters, so the air was filled with the sound of working vessels and factory whistles.
Peabody has fond early childhood memories of going to Underwood’s or the Jonesport Packing Company with his father to get bait. When Ronnie got old enough, he joined other family members working at the factories as they had for generations. According to a statistic he found in the Bangor Daily News, he said at one time, the sardine factories employed more people than any other industry in the state.
Ronnie and his wife, Mary, started collecting sardine-related artifacts and memorabilia in January 2001 with the idea of preserving them and honoring the people who worked in the factories. Although they realize it is still a work in progress, on July 4 this year, they opened their sardine history museum.
Between 1876 when the first sardine factory, Eagle Preserve Fish Company, opened in Eastport and 2000, when the last independently owned factory, L. Ray Packing Company, of Milbridge, closed, 418 sardine factories operated along Maine’s coast. (The last surviving factory, Stinson’s Seafood in Prospect Harbor is now a division of Bumblebee LLC.)
At its peak, in 1952, Peabody figures there might have been about 50 factories actively processing and packing herring. In all, Jonesport had 15 sardine factories and Eastport, the capitol of the sardine industry, had over a hundred although Peabody said, “Lubec has always claimed it was the sardine capitol of the world.”
Americans had been enjoying sardines imported from France and Spain until 1871, when the Franco-Prussian war put an end to the imported delicacy. The quest for American sardines brought Julius Wolff, owner of a New York brokerage firm that had imported them, to eastern Maine during the fall of 1875. As Peabody put it, Wolff came “prospecting for a site for a sardine factory and chose Eastport, on Passamaquoddy Bay.”
Passamaquoddy Bay, the body of water off Eastport, promised rich grounds for a sardine factory, therefore, after the success of the Eagle factory, sardine factories sprang up from as far north as Robbinston, across from St. Andrews, to other villages edging the bay and then on down the coast.
Taking a dream of starting a museum from the wishing stage to the reality of being open to the public has taken years of hard work. “It took a lot of phone calls,” Peabody said, but added that much like the domino effect, once people learned he and his wife were collecting anything sardine-related, they were willing to donate or loan the museum photographs, bill heads, sardine cans (some with fish still in them after forty or more years), paper labels, even tools and machinery such as a cooking oven, trays for the fish, a can sealer, and even a label maker.
Cataloguing the objects has taken tremendous effort, and setting up the displays has taken that, and more to the point, money. Remarkably, the Peabodys have created the museum by themselves without help from grants because granting organizations wanted them to provide matching funds, which they don’t have. They’ve already done all they can. As Ronnie put it, “We’ve got our life savings in it.” Consequently, to help offset expenses, he said that although he hates to, he’s been forced to charge admission.
The Peabodys have set up the museum in sections that illustrate different aspects of the industry and the artifacts from factories in various towns. The seining section shows the different types of seining: brush weirs, coves, and purse seining. The sardine carrier section features scale baskets made by Passamaquoddy Indians to hold fish scales. Each company’s basket, approximately 18 inches high and two feet wide tapering to 14 inches at the bottom, had its own markings. In this section, too, are scale nets.
The retorting section display shows the final cooking of the fish in what Peabody described as “a giant pressure cooker.” This section displays clocks, gauges, and factory whistles. The process section displays wire mesh fish flakes, or the flat screens that held fish and other utensils used in that process. Several processing machines fill the center of the museum.
Although they have collected some 250 photographs and many artifacts from factories all along the coast, the museum opened with displays from Robbinston to the north, Eastport to the east, and down the coast to Gouldsboro. In these sections, the Peabodys have displayed everything from hairnets and barvels: the oilskin aprons worn by the workers, to the tools they used.
The Peabodys are working their way down the coast and will add more as artifacts come in. “We are seeking artifacts from canneries in southern Maine,” Ronnie said. “We want labels, can covers, hairnets, scissors, pictures, letters, and billheads: anything and everything to do with sardine history from Rockland, west.”
He said museum has nothing from the Royal River Packing Company, in Yarmouth, not much from Southwest Harbor, Underwood’s in Bass Harbor, or from Belfast, and would appreciate receiving artifacts or even photocopies. He added “If they have quantities, we’ll even pay for shipping,” noting that donations and gifts can be claimed as exemptions on income tax as the museum is registered as a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization. Neither he nor his wife takes a salary; everything that comes in goes to support the museum.
The Maine Coast Sardine History Museum has, by now, the makings of an entire sardine factory. As if to prove it, Ronnie Peabody said, “If we had some fish and a couple of women, we could pack fish.”
The Maine Coast Sardine History Museum is open Tues., Thurs., Sun. and rainy days, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. from Memorial Day weekend through mid-October; also, year-round by appointment. The museum is at 34 Mason Bay Road, Jonesport. For more information, call (207) 497-2961 or e-mail ronniep6@verizon.net. Send donations and/or artifacts to Ronnie and Mary Peabody, 34 Mason Bay Road, Jonesport, ME 04649.