The Last Sardine Cannery: Women, Work, and an Industry's End
The Stinson Seafood Plant, Prospect Harbor, Maine, 1950–2010

About this book:

For sixty years, the Stinson Seafood plant was the beating heart of Prospect Harbor, Maine—a place where the rhythm of the tides was matched only by the lightning-fast hands of the women who hand-packed millions of sardine tins. *The Last Sardine Cannery* invites you inside the factory gates to meet the "Stinson girls": mothers, daughters, and sisters who turned a demanding trade into a powerful sisterhood, forging a community that sustained a rugged coastline through boom and bust. Through intimate oral histories and vivid archival detail, this book resurrects the clatter of the canning line, the pride of a perfected skill, and the quiet dignity of labor that built a way of life.

When Bumble Bee Foods shuttered the plant in 2010, it didn't just eliminate 128 jobs; it severed a 135-year American industry and upended the identity of a town. This is a gripping, ground-level chronicle of that final shift—a story of corporate betrayal, collapsing herring quotas, and the cold calculus of globalization that renders a community "economically unviable." Yet, even as the machines fall silent, the narrative refuses to end in despair. It follows the women into the uncertain dawn after the closure, capturing their fierce resilience as they navigate grief, reinvention, and the fight to preserve their history.

More than an industrial obituary, this is a vital American portrait of women’s work too long overlooked. From union battles and technological displacement to the intimate ecology of the Gulf of Maine, *The Last Sardine Cannery* connects the intimate journey of a single fish from ocean to can to the vast forces reshaping rural America. It is a poignant, essential testament to the hands that fed a nation—and the enduring spirit that remains when the factory whistle blows for the last time.