The Last of the Canneries

 

End of the Line

Closing the Last Sardine Cannery in America
by Markham Starr
218 pages
Wesleyan University Press

When the last American sardine cannery closed at Prospect Harbor, Maine in 2010 it ended the canning of sardines in America. It brought closer the end of a longer tradition of catching these little fish, which are more officially known as herring, in weirs. Herring trawlers made weirs relatively obsolete, but not deceased.

Weirs, built with the tops of thin trees driven into the coastal mud and draped with nets to form a wall, would now be called green technology. Before the herring trawlers arrived in the 1980’s herring weirs could still be seen in many coves along the Maine coast. Their numbers grew with the demand for herring that began in the late 1800’s until most Maine coves had weirs.

Potentially a totally biodegradable enterprise with no petrol fuel required, this technology came out of the stone-age and continues in some coves after the last American cannery closed at Prospect Harbor. There were canneries on other states most notably in California where John Steinbeck’s novel, Cannery Row put the industry on the map of the American consciousness.

Canning food began in the mid 1800’s. Lobster canning was big just down the road from Prospect Harbor in Winter Harbor during the Civil War. Sardine canning started in smaller shops and took off as technology boosted production and consolidated the industry.

Most of the sardines caught in the Gulf of Maine today go to lobster bait or to export in frozen blocks. How this little fish, which nutritionists go on about for its omega oils and calcium levels that make milk look like soda water, could have fallen on such hard times may be a question for fisheries managers and Madison Avenue. Reduced herring quotas and consumer popularity are pointed to as causes.

Sardine canning offered diversity to Maine fisheries before consolidation, employment for many coastal families and an economic boost to communities that continue to miss it. Markham Starr’s, End of the Line is a 218-page photo essay dedicated to this history, but more specifically to the people who worked at Stinson’s Cannery, the last sardine cannery in America.

In the preface Starr parallels the decline of the Maine sardine canning industry with the recent industrial decline across America. It’s the often-told story during the last presidential election of companies buying companies, stripping and selling off assets, then moving jobs overseas or over the border.

Starr’s economic assessment has merit, but it is not the whole story. Fisheries managers are not held accountable for the decline of the robust the supply of herring. This as well as how and where herring was marketed was also a part of the American canning industry’s ultimate demise.

Entering Stinson’s the machinery, conveyer belts and noise were what was first noticed.

However, it was the people hand packing cans with sardines that soon leaped out as the central activity of the operation. Cans seemed to fly past packers standing at a conveyor belt and each can would get the correct amount of fish, carefully laid out, can after can, hour after hour. In photographs from the 1890’s of Maine sardine canneries the importance of the packers is more apparent. Without the machinery all around, lights overhead, and conveyors whisking cans along, the importance of the packer’s presence in simple, dimly lit work rooms is more prominent.

Starr’s photo essay focuses on the people who worked at Stinson’s. The work they did, what the work and the job meant to them and how the loss of all this affected many who had worked there, in some cases for decades, is the heart of the book. Starr wrote, “On the final day, many workers walked away from the plant in tears.”

The plant had opened in 1875. When it closed in 2010 it was by then a highly automated plant in a village that still looks a lot like it did in 1875.

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