New Exhibits

Opening May 23, 2025

We welcome you to Sardineland. Visit the maritime communities affected by the boom and bust of Maine’s Sardine Industry and Herring Fishery. We have gathered stories from those who worked in canneries, fished for herring, and continue to live and work in these coastal communities. Sardineland tells their stories alongside photographs and tools of the trade to explore the industry’s ongoing impact on those who handled the herring—from the net to the can.

For twentieth-century Maine coastal communities, herring, marketed as sardines, equaled money. Canneries, fishing weirs, and herring fishing boats called the Maine coast home from the Canadian to New Hampshire borders. Beginning in 1875, the Sardine Industry and Herring Fishery was a major economic driver; the sardine canneries employed hundreds of women, more than the number of men fishing for herring. Changes in American eating habits, competition for herring as bait, and federal quota restrictions led to the closing of Maine’s last sardine cannery in 2010. Today some empty sardine cannery buildings stand vacant as a testament to a once thriving industry that has left a vacuum that the local economy struggles to fill, while others have been razed as gentrification or new economic drivers have filled the gap.