Sardine Boats, Belfast Packing Company, Belfast, Maine A25

Sardine Boats, Belfast Packing Company, Belfast, Maine A25

"Sardine Boats, Belfast Packing Company, Belfast, Maine A25" 1948, Belfast, Sardine, Packing, Company Sardine carriers EDWARD M., GRACE L. [included in the exhibit "Working Waterfronts"] Originally, "sardines" a different fish, were a luxury item imported from Russia. In the late 19th century, juvenile herring caught in weirs in the Lubec area were being canned and called "sardines". They caught on and by 1910, the Lubec Sardine Company had built four plants in Eastport and Lubec. As supplies of the herring became scarce in the area, the owners (Messrs Pike and Peacock) looked to expand in the Penobscot Bay area. To this end they built the plant in Belfast and began canning in August of 1911. The plant closed in 1918 but reopened in 1925 as Booth Fisheries. It remained closed during most of the 1930s and by 1940, battered by the depression, the sardine company operated sporadically under a series of owners and, at best, was a seasonal business . Calvin Stinson and Glenn Lawrence built Bath Canning in 1946 and turned it into a sardine factory. Lawrence owned the Belfast Canning Company until Stinson bought him out in 1953. It continued in an on again off again existence through the century until it closed permanently in 2001. "Glenn Lawrence, who owned the sardine plant on the Belfast waterfront until he sold it to Stinson's in 1953 built a fleet of fishing vessels for the company. His daughter Mary Perry, 81, who still lives in Belfast remembers that the EDWARD M. LAWRENCE ( on the right ), named for Glenn's father who ran the company in the early 1900s. was the first boat. Perry's daughter Glenn Anne christened the vessel, which was built in Thomaston, in 1938. The GRACE L. (left) was named for Glenn's wife. These vessels were used to collect herring from weirs around the bay, including one that belonged to Mike Brown's father in Little River, and bring them to the plant. The company also owned seine boats to fishing in the bay, Perry remembers." Republican Journal caption 1980s. NOTE: MVUS and the photo notes the EDWARD M. ( without Lawrence) and that the vessel was built in 1940.