Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

This was once the sardine capital of the world

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Don’t laugh. Sardines were once big business.

The first sardine canning in America happened in Eastport in 1876, and at its peak, 18 canneries were packed in against the waterfront downtown, along with the fishermen’s dories and fishing boats at the docks.

One of the few surviving cannery buildings. This one was small in comparison to others right downtown. 

The largest of them, the L.D. Clark and Son factory, extended far into the water from the north end of Shackford Cove only a block where I now live. It was the world’s largest sardine cannery, employing 500 men and women who packed 4,000 cases of 100 cans daily when the small Atlantic herring were available.

Heads and other parts were cut from the fish and dumped into the harbor, where they were devoured by bottom-feeders that then attracted whales close to shore.

Over the years, though, the fishery was depleted, though whales can still be seen in season.

And then the market and American tastes changed.

Does anyone eat sardines anymore?

Few signs remain of the city’s once flourishing industry.

The 1908 Seacoast Canning Co. plant, which made sardine cans.

 

 

Little Prince Cove has its charm 

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The inlet gets its name from an early family rather than royalty, even if the British Navy did land here when it captured Eastport during the War of 1812.

Its banks once were crowded with shipbuilding and later fishing operations.
Eastport’s leading lobster wholesaler operates from the mouth of Prince Cove.
You can’t see this Victorian-style house from land, where it sits beyond an imposing gate at the end of the road. Nobody seems to know the owners, who come in the summer.
Somehow, it seems to fit right into a Stephen King novel. 

 

How about corporate naming rights for hurricanes?

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Running out of baby’s first names for hurricanes and tropical storms has me wondering.

Can we turn to corporate behemoths, you know, for naming rights, like sports stadiums do?

Hurricane Amazon would be a natural. Or Geico, reminding folks of the need of home insurance. Victoria’ Secret Hurricane could be hot. You get the drift.

And let’s think about all the good uses we could put the money to, starting with relief for impoverished folks in those storms’ paths.

So how ’bout it?

What corporations would you nominate as the most amusing or fitting for the storms?

~*~

Misty afternoon light over Campobello Island as seen from Eastport gets me in a reflective mood.

Full moon rising

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Refined Japanese, I’m told, would gather with sake to watch the full moon rise. First there’s only the crown of the head, and then the brow and cheeks and chin before the moon lifts altogether in the air. The passage is both slow and fleet, maybe five minutes, if that.

The event would be celebrated with the writing of hokku on the spot.

Here’s how it happened one summer night in Eastport, looking over Campobello Island. And this is what you get rather than a cocktail or poem.

 

 

 

 

 

America’s largest cities in 1820

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Shifts in the nation’s economy are reflected in the 1820 Census, where Missouri and Maine are about to be admitted as states. The major population centers, however, are still seaports.

  1. New York (123,706), making it the first American city to surpass 100,000 population.
  2. Philadelphia (63,802). If the two suburbs, below, were included, it would approach that 100k threshold.
  3. Baltimore (62,738). The port has leapt to third place and is nearly as big as Philadelphia City. While
  4. Boston (43,298) has fallen way behind.
  5. New Orleans (27,176). The biggest city west of the Appalachian Mountains, it’s still smaller than today’s Dover, New Hampshire. In other words, most of these cities weren’t really big.
  6. Charleston, South Carolina (24,780). It’s the center of urban life in the South. But from everything I’ve heard, it was largely of a small-town flavor.
  7. Northern Liberties, Pennsylvania (19,678). Now a neighborhood of Philadelphia.
  8. Southwark, Pennsylvania (14,713). Now a neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
  9. Washington, District of Columbia (13,247). First appearance of the new capital in the Top Ten, where it wouldn’t appear again until 1950.
  10. Salem, Massachusetts (12,731). New England is losing its edge in the American scene, relatively.

Bold Coast is an apt description

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While Eastport and its neighboring towns are technically on Fundy Bay, they’re sheltered from the open ocean. Not so for much of Lubec and Cutler to our south, where the shoreline on the open Atlantic rivals anything Acadia has to offer. It helps to know where the trailheads and parking are, though. Here are some views from the trails in the Maine state public lands in Cutler.

Best of all, there was no crowd. Just me and a young couple who were planning to land one of the five primitive campsites at the far end of the coastal trail. I met only ten other folks in the next five hours, all of them delightful.
So what had been stripping the bark off these trees? My “Scats and Tracks of the Northeast” field guide points to Canada lynx, which leave “chin rubs” like these and live in “dense conifer forests interspersed with rocky ledges and downed timber.”  There are also forest edges nearby where their major prey, snowshoe hare, might be found. 
While this trunk seems to be a natural totem pole.
Look out, below!
Except that pretty soon, the trail’s crossing down there.
A slightly inland loop back crosses many peat moss bogs, where plank boardwalks are a necessity.