The Giant Blueberry of Jonesboro
Today, a visit to the Main Coast Sardine History Museum in Jonesport, Ronnie & Mary Peabody, founders and curators. The Museum was closed as we pulled up but Mary invited us in for a visit that lasted nearly an hour with her husband and her parents, June and Jack from Calais.
Sardine Museum, Jonesport
Between 1876 when the first sardine factory, the Eagle Preserve Fish Company, opened in Eastport and 2000, when the last independently owned factory, the 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.
Several years ago, Ronnie and his wife, Mary, began to make phone calls to friends and acquaintances, particularly to people of their parents’ generation who had been employed or some way involved in the sardine industry. Once people heard they were collecting anything sardine-related, they were willing to donate or loan the museum photographs, billheads and hogsheads (large barrels), sardine cans (some with fish still in them after forty or more years), hairnets, oilskin aprons, braille nets, dippers, half-models of work boats by a local boat builder, business letters and contracts, paper labels, tools and machinery, giant cast iron retorts used for sterilizing the canned fish (“They’re just oversized pressure cookers.”), trays for steaming and moving the fish from one work station to another, a can sealer, a couple automated label makers, factory whistles, and entire wall of “ladies’ scissors,” each one with the name of its former owner carefully identified. (The scissors were used for snipping off the heads and tails of each fish, and kept razor-sharp.)
-I remember I could hear the Underwood (Eastport) whistle all the way over to Perry, a distance of five miles, June noted. Of course, it depended on the way the wind was blowing.
The work of cataloging and displaying the artifacts has become a full-time job for Ronnie and Mary.
-We've got our life savings in it, Ronnie says. And until recently, they haven’t been able to put their hands on any grant assistance since they were caught in the chicken-and-egg situation familiar to many small nonprofit organizations -- being turned down for assistance because they couldn’t provide matching funds. Mary proudly noted that they had received a seed money grant from Stephen King and his wife, and that the museum had recently received 501(c) 3 status.
"Sardines are in my blood."
In May 1775, the armed English 100-ton schooner Margaretta under the command of James Moore, anchored off the Machias town wharf. Local feelings were already running high, fueled by recent news of the skirmishes around Boston, and settlers had set up a Liberty Pole at the water’s edge. A prolonged quarrel followed. This subversive and defiant act infuriated the British commander, James Moore, and he threatened to shell the town if it was not immediately removed. Armed with muskets, pitchforks and a single small cannon, settlers overran the Margaretta, though, killing the officer and at least four others in the process and then hauled the ship up to the head of the tide in Middle River, to a locale later known as Marshfield. A month later, Machias men captured a second British armed schooner, the Diligence, that happened to dock at Machias during a mapping expedition along the coast.
During the war, Machias crews re-fit and armed several ships -- including the Margaretta -- and sailed forth looking for battle with the British. In 1776 and 1777, several British officers received orders to bombard and level Machias. The residents of Machias, however, withstood these efforts so fiercely that the town became known as the "Hornet's Nest" to the British admiralty. One officer noted, "Those damned rebels at Machias were a harder set than those at Bunker Hill."
Stephen Cook’s Sea Salt Farm sits right across the road from the head of the tide in Marshfield.
The Salt Man
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