November Newsletter

By Matt Wheeler, Digital Collections Curator

We’re pleased to turn the spotlight to our new Digital Museum! This replaces the web portal we’ve used to create online collections access for over 17 years. We know so many of you regularly use this resource, so we encourage you to delete bookmarks you may have to our previous portal as that is now permanently offline.

We encourage new and returning visitors to experience the rich storytelling power of Penobscot Marine Museum’s collections through the Digital Museum, with a fresh look and improved capabilities we’ve been anticipating for months. On this site, you’ll be able to explore tens of thousands of described images representing the wealth of items preserved and exhibited at the museum: folk art, maritime paintings, photographs, tools and artifacts from Maine’s traditional industries, luxury goods from historic sea trade, and vintage small watercraft. The Digital Museum will be an exciting way to learn about the long history of the Penobscot Bay region and its connections to the rest of the world.

If you’re not familiar with our museum’s holdings, the Explore page provides loosely guided topical browsing; the current themes are The Iconic Lobster, Regional Watercraft, and Vacationland. You can also step into the Gallery, which will load a cascade of engrossing images; keep clicking Load More at the bottom of the page to view new items. Use the Basic Search tool to find items by keyword, or the Advanced Search to limit your results to a collection, a place, a vessel, etc.

In the future, the Digital Museum will include curated online exhibits, featured collections, a timeline, the ability to save your favorite items, and an ecommerce feature to allow online print or digital image purchases.

We would like to extend our sincere appreciation to all of those who have made this substantial project possible. Thank you to the generous donors who made financial contributions and to the many volunteers who have refined the details behind the scenes. It has truly been a team effort.

Since this platform is new and results from a massive data migration from the old platform, mismatched images or information are bound to pop up. Please feel free to send us comments when you notice these glitches, and we’ll straighten them out promptly.

If the links to the Digital Museum on our main site result in a Page Not Found error, please clear your browser cache, refresh the page, and try again. If you have questions about how to use features of the Digital Museum, please contact us at 207-548-2529 or [email protected].

Many thanks for your curiosity, and happy browsing!

By Kevin Johnson, Photo Archivist

A long-awaited book of photographs and accompanying stories drawn from the National Fisherman Collection will be out early next month. Michael Crowley, a Contributing Editor and Field Editor for National Fisherman, started this effort during the Covid pandemic, painstakingly looking through and selecting around 100 photographs from the tens of thousands of photos that make up the collection. He then researched and wrote stories to accompany the photographs. The subject matter of the photographs are boat building and fishing, and the stories about them are historical, funny, tragic and triumphant.

National Fisherman, a Maine based magazine for commercial fishing and billed as "the saltiest magazine on the newsstand," and its predecessor Atlantic Fisherman, have documented the lives of those working the sea for more than a century. The pre-digital archive of more than 20,000 photographs were donated to PMM in 2012, and have since been digitized and cataloged and are now available in the museum's online database.

The book is being published by Islandport Press. Working the Sea is available for pre-order in the museum's online store, and will be available in bookstores around the state.

In anticipation of the release, we will hold a book talk on Thursday, November 14th, and celebrate with a book launch on Saturday, December 7th. A PMM created exhibit of the photographs featured in the book will be on display at the Belfast Public Library in January and February.

By Cipperly Good, Richard Saltonstall Jr. Curator of Maritime History

Maine’s first sardine canneries found their home in the Washington County town of Eastport in 1875. As seen on the graph below, Washington County dominated the number of sardines packed in Maine well into the 1970s. In 1879, Hancock County saw its first cannery open, and reliably had the second highest number of sardines packed. As canneries in other counties began to close, Hancock County took over in 2000 as the highest producing county. The last cannery closed in the Hancock County town of Gouldsboro in 2010.

We have been digging deep into these statistics as we conduct research and gather information for a new 2025-2026 exhibit, Sardineland. As the details come together, we are creating an online story map to document the number of canneries operating in Maine from 1876 to 2010. The map will guide online visitors to the towns in which sardine canneries operated and will trace the various companies and mergers over the years. We have started out with the Washington County sardine cannery towns, but will expand to cover all the coastal counties, so check back periodically! Watch our progress here.

By Matt Wheeler, Digital Collections Curator

With heavy hearts and gratitude, we say goodbye this month to our colleague and friend Deanna Bonner-Ganter. Her 2016 biography Kosti Ruohomaa: The Photographer Poet chronicled the life and work of the midcoast Maine photojournalist. Thanks to our time—too short— with Deanna, we came to truly appreciate Ruohomaa’s images.

Deanna made her peaceful exit with her daughter Camille at her bedside on Tuesday, October 15th. She’s sorely missed. We enjoyed her warmth, keen intellect, levity, her intent yet distracted work style (which seemed to arise from an artistic temperament), her affinity for people, art, and being here on the planet. Goodbye, dear lady; you’ll always be here with us.