Lobster in a Can?!
Tinned fish is currently trending in a big way, with their colorful tin designs and flavors like smoked mackerel and albacore with chimichurri. According to Business Insider, Americans have spent $3.25 billion on tinned fish over the past year, and it is quickly becoming the hot item for charcuterie boards and Instagram posts across the nation.
Did you know the first lobster cannery was established in Eastport, Maine in the 1840s and by 1880 there were over 23 canneries in the state, ten of which canned exclusively lobster? The demand for canned lobster soared! Places from Ohio to California and everywhere in between could enjoy Maine lobster without making the trip to New England.
Interior of our permanent exhibit, Lobstering and the Maine Coast
Close-up of the advertisement, “small flat tins.”
J. Winslow Jones can, ca. 1880s. Museum collection.
Burnham & Morrill Company advertisement from the Paris Exposition; Burnham & Morrill operated most recently in Maine as B&M Baked Beans in Portland, Maine, closing the facility in 2021.
Women were predominately employed in lobster factories, In his 1887 book The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, George Brown Goode writes that “men attend to the heavier kinds of work, while the picking out and washing of the meat, the filling, weighing, scouring, painting, and labeling of the cans is generally done by women.” Looking at a census from 1870 shows that twelve out of fifteen employees of a factory in North Haven were women who averaged about 20 years old.
Cannery workers, ca. 1900. Museum collection
Cannery cooking vessel, Museum collection
These women were hard workers, as seen in the illustrations from the 1881 issue of Scribner’s Monthly “The Belle of the Lobster-Shop” and her 1900 cannery counterparts are clearly “of robuster Yankee type, about which there is no suspicion of consumption”.
“Canners,” Scribner’s Monthly, June 1881
The Belle of the Lobster-Shop, Scribner’s Monthly, June 1881
Next time you visit the museum, stop by our store to pick up your own cannery-inspired mug to show off your love of tinned seafood:
Make maritime history part of your morning routine with this custom Lobstering & the Maine Coast Mug inspired by an early 19th-century canning label. The colorful 11 oz ceramic mug is unique, durable and dishwasher safe.