Catherine Schmitt, “Penobscot River Dams”
Thursday, June 1, 7 pm
Visitors Center, 2 Church St.
Cost: $8, $5 Members
Join Catherine for a discussion of how dams and other environmental changes have affected salmon in the past, and how current efforts are working to restore salmon to their traditional spawning grounds.

Bill Leavenworth, “Maine Coastal Fisheries”
Thursday, July 6, 7 pm
Visitors Center, 2 Church St.
Cost: $8, $5 Members
Bill Leavenworth pours through old fishing logs and data housed at Penobscot Marine Museum and other fisheries research archives to shed light on the health of the fishing stocks over time. Come hear his latest research on the Maine coastal fisheries, which through 1924 caught more seafood product each year by weight and variety than Maine’s distant water fisheries (Grand Banks).

Cipperly Good, “Maine in the Coolie Trade”
Thursday, August 3, 7 pm
Visitors Center, 2 Church St.
Cost: $8, $5 Members

Maine merchant mariners in the 1850s and 1860s began carrying a new cargo on their China Trade Route: Chinese indentured servants bound for the sugar plantations of Cuba. Come see logbooks and shipping papers that shed light on the voyage to a new plantation economy.

Jeff Dworsky, “A Way of Life: Fishing Families of Stonington”
Thursday, August 10, 7 pm
PMM's Merithew House, 6 Church Street
Cost: $8, $5 Members

Join us for a conversation with photographer Jeff Dworsky as he talks about the changing way of life in Stonington Maine and what inspired him to document it. 

What happens when the oceans are emptied of all their fish? What happens when three hundred years of human knowledge and expertise disappear before the onslaught of the technology-driven world? Author and fisherman Paul Molyneaux will answer these questions during our speaker’s series on September 7 at 7pm in the Museum Admissions Center at 2 Church Street.

Molyneaux wrote The Doryman’s Reflection, an account of what transpired in the New England fisheries over the past half century, as told by the people who lived it, including Molyneaux himself. Fishermen survive as relics, the last hunter-gatherers among us. Their boats, crammed with ropes and nets, carry the mystique of a nearly forgotten world ruled by the elements. Molyneaux as a young man journeyed to Maine with no experience and a dream of working on a boat. This is the story of his apprenticeship with Bernard Raynes, one of Maine’s last independent commercial fishermen. Originally published in 2005, the book has been thoroughly updated to cover the events of the past ten years.

For more information, please call 207-548-2529.