“Welcome to Sardineland” Exhibit Talk with Matt Wheeler, Penobscot Marine Museum

Join PMM Digital Curator Matt Wheeler on Thursday, April 30, 6:30 PM in the Picker Room for a visual tour of the sardine era in Maine. This talk will conclude the month-long exhibit Welcome to Sardineland on display in the Library Picker Room, from Penobscot Marine Museum.

Mainers are resourceful: when out-of-state canning syndicates started marketing Maine juvenile herring as “sardines” late in the 19th century—partly as an answer to the strong European demand for this food commodity—local entrepreneurs made an industry out of it. For well over a century, sardines formed the economic, cultural, and social backbone of communities all along our state’s coast. The workforce in canneries included thousands of women, even more than the number of men fishing for herring, a groundswell that owed a lot to the popularity of sardines as military rations during WWII.

In the decades after the war, changes in American eating habits, competition for herring as bait, and federal quota restrictions led to the gradual collapse of this trend, ending with the closing of Maine’s last sardine cannery in 2010. Former boomtowns went bust; others reinvented themselves. 

Matt Wheeler serves as Digital Curator at PMM and has been working in the Museum’s Photo Archives since 2011. He guides PMM in building sound digital collections with an eye to accessibility and sustainability. Matt grew up in Camden and Lincolnville, living on and appreciating Penobscot Bay, and enjoys engaging audiences in the digital age with stories of the region’s cultural heritage.

This story is the basis for Penobscot Marine Museum’s 2024-25 campus-wide exhibit, Sardineland, which draws heavily from the museum’s holdings; their photo collections are burgeoning with images from the canneries, the packing competitions, the fishery, and the state’s marketing efforts.