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.
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.
The Muscongus Bay sloop was a very popular inshore fishing (hand lining) and lobstering boat type in mid-coast Maine in the mid 19th century. Locally called sloop boats, small ones like this evolved into larger sloop boats, thirty feet or so long, commonly called Friendship sloops as many were built in Friendship. This boat has Bristol on her trailboard which may indicate her town.
This image is from G. Brown Goode's The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, 1884-1887. This book can be found online at NOAA
This diagram shows a cross-section of a composite iron and wood vessel, much like those built in Britain. Composite construction used iron for frames and deck beams. This design provided greater strength and cargo capacity than an all-wood vessel, making it hard for Maine shipbuilders to compete.
From Capt. H. Paasch, Illustrated Marine Encyclopedia, 1890, Plate 13.
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
