For more than a century, the sardine — not lobster — was the king of Maine’s coastal fisheries.
The industry may be gone but the people who helped catch and pack the little fish for sale around the world remain with stories to share. There’s an effort underway in Searsport to preserve that history.
From ‘Sardineland’ to ‘Vacationland’
At the height of production during the 1950s, dozens of canneries fueled the economies of towns like Lubec, Belfast and Eastport. At that time, two out of every three sardines sold in the U.S. were packed in Maine.
That effort took entire communities helping to steer canned fish production. While the men of Maine’s coastal villages were on the water catching the fish, it was women who stood for hours in the canneries cutting up the tiny fish and packing them into tin cans.
“I remember cutting off the heads and the tails and having all these fish heads staring up at me,” said Anne Shure, who worked at the Stinson Cannery in Belfast during summers from 1971 to 1973. She still remembers all the sights — and other aspects of the cannery.
Shure said she was paid by the can and aimed to pack hundreds of fish a day. She remembers wrapping her fingers to prevent cuts from scales and scissors.
“It definitely smelled,” she said. “No one would go in my car because it smelled like sardines.”
The Maine sardines are actually a species of herring but were marketed as sardines to compete with European markets when canneries opened in the late 1800s.
During World War II, preserved fish were ideal to send to soldiers fighting overseas. After the soldiers came home, Maine boasted more than 40 active canneries along its coast.
But by the 1970s, when Shure was putting in long hours at the Stinson Cannery, the industry had already started to lose steam.
Kevin Johnson, the photo archivist at the Penobscot Maritime Museum in Searsport, said a few factors contributed to the decline.
“Overfishing being a primary one, but people’s taste also changed,” he said. “And inventions of things like refrigerators and coolers and microwaves and other things made it so you didn’t have to rely on something that was preserved for a quick meal.”
Maine canaries began to shutter one by one, creating economic upheaval in communities along the coast.
“You can imagine what it was like in these smaller towns where there was a cannery that employed up to 1,000 people,” Johnson said. “When that shuts down, it’s leaving a big gap in the livelihood of that town.”
Johnson said the closed canneries left a vacuum that some local economies still struggle to fill, while others have been repurposed or have new economic drivers to fill the gap.
Restoring ‘Big Jim’
In a barn in Bellmont, a group of artists are busy repainting a towering, 40-foot-tall aluminum sign of a smiling fisherman. His name is “Big Jim.”
At the peak of the industry, a group called the Maine Sardine Council was formed by the Legislature to market and support Maine sardines. Big Jim was part of an advertising campaign in the 1960s, which also included comic books, newspaper ads and commercials.
“Big Jim is supposedly Jim Warren, who was the director of the Maine Sardine Council,” Kevin Johnson said. “Whether it was his idea or they just jokingly nicknamed the sign after him … that’s how Big Jim came to be.”
For years, Big Jim stood tall on the side of Route 1 and would greet travelers as they crossed into Maine. Then he was moved to Prospect Harbor where hundreds of tourists have snapped selfies with him. But with new ownership, the sign has gone through changes over the years, including painting over his iconic can of sardines to look like a lobster trap.
Last year, the Penobscot Maritime Museum raised $30,000 to restore Big Jim to how he looked in the 1950s. He’ll also be moved to Searsport for the summer as the main attraction for “Sardineland” — an exhibit about the history of the industry.
Annadeene Fowler leads the all-women artist group called the WOW Collective. She’s using a virtual reality headset to project vintage images of Big Jim onto the bare metal.
She traces the shapes while the other women in the group add in tiny details like the shadows and creases on Big Jim’s pants.
Fowler said the project has given the WOW Collective a greater appreciation for the industry that once employed some of their relatives.
“We really appreciate all the fishermen that were part of the sardine industry. But we’re also thinking about the women who were in the canneries and that important part of history,” she said. “It’s kind of a neat connection for us.”
This summer, Big Jim will be prominently featured along Main Street in Searsport. The Penobscot Maritime Museum’s Sardineland exhibit will also include historic photos of people working in canneries and on the water, along with hundreds of retro advertisements for Maine sardines.
For Kevin Johnson restoring Big Jim is about preserving history while those who remember catching and canning sardines are still around to experience it.
“It was important, and a big part of Maine’s identity and culture,” he said. “To be able to celebrate it, and to not wait 50 years to celebrate it, is important.”
The Stinson Seafood Plant, where Anne Shure worked as a teenager, was the last cannery to close in the United States in 2010.
The closure made national news, and a photo of Big Jim even made it in The New York Times edition from that day.
As for Shure, she said cutting fish for three summers taught her the value of hard work. And she says it has paid off multiple times in her life.
“I ended up working at an educational publishing company in the Boston area. And after the first day of work, I got called into the office by my supervisor. She said to me, ‘you know, the reason I hired you is that if you can pack sardines, you can do this job.’”
Big Jim and the Sardineland exhibit at the Penobscot Maritime Museum will open Memorial Day Weekend.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.