Search Results

Keywords: Fishing industry

Historical Items

View All Showing 2 of 623 Showing 3 of 623

Item 31083

Fishing Net with attached cork floats, ca. 1945

Contributed by: Scarborough Historical Society & Museum Date: circa 1945 Location: Scarborough Media: Netting,cork

Item 68456

Early fishing schooner, ca. 1870

Contributed by: Swan's Island Historical Society Date: circa 1870 Location: Swan's Island Media: Photographic print

Item 61873

Fishing for tuna with a harpoon, Swan's Island, ca. 1950

Contributed by: Swan's Island Historical Society Date: circa 1950 Location: Swan's Island Media: Photographic print

Online Exhibits

View All Showing 2 of 49 Showing 3 of 49

Exhibit

Raising Fish

Mainers began propagating fish to stock ponds and lakes in the mid 19th century. The state got into the business in the latter part of the century, first concentrating on Atlantic salmon, then moving into raising other species for stocking rivers, lakes, and ponds.

Exhibit

Early Fish Canneries in Brooklin

By the 1900s, numerous fish canneries began operating in Center Harbor, located within the Brooklin community. For over thirty years, these plants were an important factor in the community.

Exhibit

A Town Is Born: South Bristol, 1915

After being part of the town of Bristol for nearly 150 years, residents of South Bristol determined that their interests would be better served by becoming a separate town and they broke away from the large community of Bristol.

Site Pages

View All Showing 2 of 220 Showing 3 of 220

Site Page

Swan's Island: Six miles east of ordinary - Salmon industry

"It would provide another fishing industry source in addition to the lobstering, scalloping, and shrimping already in place."

Site Page

Lincoln, Maine - Ira Fish

"He moved to Patten in 1840. Ira Fish drawing by Miranda Johnson X Ira Fish accomplished many things."

Site Page

Islesboro--An Island in Penobscot Bay - Businesses and Cottage Industries

"Nets supported the fishing industry, as they were needed for crab and lobster pots and other fishing endeavors."

My Maine Stories

View All Showing 2 of 15 Showing 3 of 15

Story

Cleaning Fish or How Grandfather and Grandmother got by
by Randy Randall

Grandfather and Grandmother subsisted on the fish Grandfather caught, not always legally.

Story

My Paper Industry career and setting up a museum
by Sherry Judd

I worked in and around the Paper Industry all my life. Now I run Maine's Paper and Heritage Museum.

Story

Backup Captain
by Shannon & Asa Richards

Our family’s deep connections to the maritime and fishing communities

Lesson Plans

View All Showing 2 of 2 Showing 2 of 2

Lesson Plan

Bicentennial Lesson Plan

Primary Sources: The Maine Shipyard

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: Social Studies
This lesson plan will give students a close-up look at historical operations behind Maine's famed shipbuilding and shipping industries. Students will examine primary sources including letters, bills of lading, images, and objects, and draw informed hypotheses about the evolution of the seafaring industry and its impact on Maine’s communities over time.

Lesson Plan

Longfellow Studies: Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" and "Whitman's Song of Myself" - Alternative Constructions of the American Worker

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
Most if not all of us have or will need to work in the American marketplace for at least six decades of our lives. There's a saying that I remember a superintendent telling a group of graduating high-school seniors: remember, when you are on your deathbed, you will not be saying that you wish you had spent more time "at the office." But Americans do spend a lot more time working each year than nearly any other people on the planet. By the end of our careers, many of us will have spent more time with our co-workers than with our families. Already in the 21st century, much has been written about the "Wal-Martization" of the American workplace, about how, despite rocketing profits, corporations such as Wal-Mart overwork and underpay their employees, how workers' wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s, while the costs of college education and health insurance have risen out of reach for many citizens. It's become a cliché to say that the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" is widening to an alarming degree. In his book Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips says we are dangerously close to becoming a plutocracy in which one dollar equals one vote. Such clashes between employers and employees, and between our rhetoric of equality of opportunity and the reality of our working lives, are not new in America. With the onset of the industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, many workers were displaced from their traditional means of employment, as the country shifted from a farm-based, agrarian economy toward an urban, manufacturing-centered one. In cities such as New York, groups of "workingmen" (early manifestations of unions) protested, sometimes violently, unsatisfactory labor conditions. Labor unions remain a controversial political presence in America today. Longfellow and Whitman both wrote with sympathy about the American worker, although their respective portraits are strikingly different, and worth juxtaposing. Longfellow's poem "The Village Blacksmith" is one of his most famous and beloved visions: in this poem, one blacksmith epitomizes characteristics and values which many of Longfellow's readers, then and now, revere as "American" traits. Whitman's canto (a section of a long poem) 15 from "Song of Myself," however, presents many different "identities" of the American worker, representing the entire social spectrum, from the crew of a fish smack to the president (I must add that Whitman's entire "Song of Myself" is actually 52 cantos in length). I do not pretend to offer these single texts as all-encompassing of the respective poets' ideas about workers, but these poems offer a starting place for comparison and contrast. We know that Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, just as we know that Whitman came to be one of the most controversial. Read more widely in the work of both poets and decide for yourselves which poet speaks to you more meaningfully and why.