Geographic Locations

These recognition views of Mount Desert and other places along Maine's coast help navigators determine their location. These are from The English Pilot, Fourth Book, published in 1767. Online via Boston Public Library.

When the Penobscot Marine Museum was founded in 1936, the town of Searsport gave the museum its original Town Hall building, built in 1845. It was the museum's only building until the museum purchased the Merithew House, in 1950.

Detail from Eldridge's Chart from Cape Cod to Belle Isle, Including the Bay of Fundy, Gulf of St. Lawrence and Banks of Newfoundland

Detail from chart, Gulf and River St. Lawrence including the Coast from Breton Island to Cape Cod and the Island & Banks of Newfoundland.

The winter of 1905 was hard, but not as hard as the winter before. Temperatures seldom rose above 12 degrees Fahrenheit. From early February until mid March, much of the upper Penobscot Bay was frozen solid, with 5 inches or more of ice. Steamboat travel was suspended. Newspaper reports beginning mid February told of people walking from Castine to Belfast and of an "ice bridge" to Islesboro on which teams pulled wagons and sleighs. The ice sometimes gave out: one man lost a boiler and engine and his horses when they broke through the ice going from Bucksport to Winterport.

J.F.W. DesBarres, British Army artillery officer and surveyor, oversaw the surveying and publication of the best set of charts of the American coast until the early to mid 1800s. The set was known as the Atlantic Neptune. They were useful to the British during the American Revolution. See DesBarres biography in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Real estate development for summer residents and tourists started in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as steamboats made travel from Boston easy. For the Penobscot bound, overnight boats from Boston stopped in Rockland by dawn after leaving Boston in the evening and were in Bangor by mid day. From the major Penobscot towns of the western shore, travelers transferred to smaller steamers for Mount Desert and smaller towns and islands.

Mark Wadsworth was one of Rockport's herring weir fishermen in the 1950s. Here he is dipping herring into his peapod or double -ender (which he built) for transfer to the herring carrier. Penobscot Marine Museum has one of his peapods, built for a summer family, in its collection. Wadsworth also lobstered from his peapod using an outboard on a bracket to help tend his traps

Lobstering from an open boat with a gasoline engine and a torpedo stern. When this photograph was taken in 1949, this boat was obsolete. Square sterned boats were by then common, as were automobile-based gasoline engines and standing shelters to protect both engine and fisherman. Photograph from the Atlantic Fisherman collection.

This photo shows the great volume of lobstering activity in a small harbor like Friendship. A relatively modern lobster boat (for the 1950s) lies at the wharf. There are the usual piles of lobster traps and hanging buoys. A double-ender or peapod probably used as a tender lies at the ramp. In the anchorage are a number of open lobster boats, one with a canvas cover for the engine and what appears to be a Friendship sloop converted to power with a standing shelter where the cuddy once was forward.