B A C K   T H E N

W. K. Lewis, of W. K. Lewis & Brothers, probably in the ‘60s. About 1860, the Lewises erected a lobster-canning factory on Isle au Haut; in 1871, “owing to an unpleasantness,” the machinery was relocated to Deer Isle. Whatever had transpired, W. K. Lewis had married an island girl, and his water-stained portrait and the empty shell of the old factory yet remain on Isle au Haul. In the early ‘80s, the company owned fifteen canning factories in Maine and the Provinces, canning a variety of foods. Although the Lewises were from Falmouth, the flrm was headquartered in Boston.

In 1809, Nicholas Appert was rewarded by Napoleon for devising canning as a means of supplying better food for the army, although it would be many years before the scientific reason for the efficacy of the process was understood.
Portland became a pioneering center of the canning industry. No two accounts of this era entirely agree on who did what when, which is perhaps to be expected, given the epic legal battles fought to decide just those points. It would appear that the practice of canning lobster meat traveled from France to Scotland to Eastport to Portland. About 1849, with brother George, W. K. Lewis established a lobster-canning factory on Portland’s Custom House Wharf. Future canning magnates Samuel Rumery and George Burnham, Jr., may have learned the trade there.

The idea for canning corn originated with the three Winslow brothers. Captain Hezikiah and Isaac, interested in the French whale flshery, took note of the canned provisions used aboard the French ships, and Nathan began to experiment with canning corn at Portland about 1839. After the proverbial inventor’s struggle, “Winslow’s Patent Hermetically Sealed Green Corn,” put up in long, thin tubes, became a practical success in 1852. A patent granted ten years later opened up a golden age for Portland lawyers. It’s assignee, John Winslow Jones, would become the state’s biggest packer, and later, its biggest bankrupt.

In the meantime, Rumery and Burnham formed the flrm of Rumery & Burnham, and then joined forces with Davis, Baxter & Co., to create the Portland Packing Co., long the world’s largest canner of corn, lobster, and mackerel, among many other offerings. Portland Packing is presumed to have made great profits during the Civil War, in large part from beef killed and canned in Portland’s West End. In 1867, Burnham left to join George Morrill as Burnham & Monill. (The Crimean War also proved very profitable for Portland’s packers.)

Lobsters had been so plentiful before the canning era that they annoyed cod flshermen by becoming entangled in their lines, and were chopped up for bait. The unrestricted canning of lobsters, some as small as half a pound, was doubtless the cause for the drastic decline in the lobster population, which resulted in the first attempts to regulate the flshery in the ‘70s. The flrst “close time,” from August to October, was suspected by flshermen simply to be a means by which the canners could move their sealers to the inland corn shops without fear of competition. Other regulatory versions followed, including restrictions on the overall length of lobsters, which resulted in the stretching of lobsters.

By the mid-’90s, declining catches and increased competition from the live market had forced all the lobster factories to the Maritimes. The rise of the canneries had coincided with the decline of the offshore flsheries, and lobster flshing had become an important coastal activity. By the late ‘90s, however, in many areas, it had fallen to a poor man’s occupation. Sensible laws flnally established a carapace length for a legal lobster, setting the stage for the fishery’s salvation by, in essence, turning lobstering into a form of fish farming.

By 1892, Burnham & Morrill had grown to include sixteen vegetable canneries in Maine and twenty-two lobster canneries in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. It remains today a thriving survivor of Portland’s once-great canning industry. While Portland Packing is long gone, its legacy survives through the city’s Baxter Memorial Library, and the incomparable Baxter State Park.

Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 2, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine. 800-582-1899