CBS NEWS: So Long Sardines: America's Last Cannery Closing

[laststeamtrain]

PROSPECT HARBOR, Maine, April 14,
So Long Sardines: America's Last Cannery Closing
Closure Will Put Lid on Small Tinned Fish Industry's 135 Year History in Maine, Leave 130 Jobless

(AP) The intensely fishy smell of herring has been the smell of money for generations of workers in Maine who have snipped, sliced and packed the small, silvery fish into billions of cans of sardines on their way to Americans' lunch buckets and kitchen cabinets.

For the past 135 years, sardine canneries have been as much a part of Maine's small coastal villages as the thick Down East fog. It's been estimated that more than 400 canneries have come and gone along the state's long, jagged coast.

The lone survivor, the Stinson Seafood plant here in this eastern Maine shoreside town, shuts down this week after a century in operation. It is the last sardine cannery not just in Maine, but in the United States.

<snip>

Once considered an imported delicacy, sardines now have a humble reputation. They aren't one species of fish. Instead, sardines are any of dozens of small, oily, cold-water fish that are part of the herring family that are sold in tightly packed cans.

The first U.S. sardine cannery opened in Maine in 1875, when a New York businessman set up the Eagle Preserved Fish Co. in Eastport.

Dozens of plants soon popped up, sounding loud horns and whistles to alert local workers when a boat came in with its catch from the herring-rich ocean waters off Maine. By 1900 there were 75 canneries, where knife-wielding men, women and young children expertly sliced off heads and tails and removed innards before packing them tight into sardine tins.

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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/14/national/main6394365.shtml

[Jennicut]

1. The plant might be bought and used for something else...I hope.

APNewsBreak: Gov says deal close for sardine plant

By CLARKE CANFIELD (AP) – 45 minutes ago

PORTLAND, Maine — Maine Gov. John Baldacci says a deal is close to save the plant that is home to the nation's last sardine cannery.

Bumble Bee Foods is shutting down the Stinson Seafood cannery in Prospect Harbor. Thursday is the last day of production.

A spokesman for the governor said Thursday that Bumble Bee has signed a nonbinding letter of intent with a seafood-processing company that is interested in buying the plant. A new owner would use the plant to process seafood, but probably not sardines.

The spokesman, David Farmer, says the deal could be completed by mid-May.

Farmer says the prospective buyer would give hiring preference to current employees and that the new operation could be up and running in August.

The buyer has not been named.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5itQRMrEycgS7ITp5380KMcxBwjxgD9F3KHNO2

[laststeamtrain]

2. Good news!

:thumbsup:

PS: Cannery Row & Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck are good, funny, affecting books.

I hate it when a 'lifeway' disappears.

[lonestarnot]

3. Is the buyer Chinese?

[Jennicut]

4. Doesn't say in the article.

[awoke_in_2003]

5. "hiring preference to current employees"

that is good to hear