Smokin'

We made reservations for a whale watching trip leaving out of Lubec.  Lubec is about a 3 hour drive from here.  The boat didn’t leave until 1:00 p.m. but we left the house early.  We had a museum we wanted to see and we wanted to eat lunch before getting on the boat.

About 1 1/2 hours into our drive we received a phone call from the whale watching folks letting us know that the winds were too strong and the trip was cancelled.  We decided to go keep driving to Lubec and stay with our other plans.

We stopped at the McCurdy Smokehouse which is now a museum dedicated to the history of the industry in Lubec.

It’s been over 25 years since the smokehouse was in operation but it still smells like smoke and fish.  There is a $4 fee for the museum.

Lubec fishermen brought in thousands of tons of Atlantic herring a year from the weirs scattered in the nearby Bay of Fundy.  Anybody over 10 years old worked in the smokehouses.

This is one of the herring sticks.

This is a room full of herring sticks!  It’s amazing that they have not been destroyed.  The smell of smoked fish was strongest in this room.  You can still see the oil on the sticks.

The fish were hung up to 30 feet in the air from the rafters of the smokehouse, while the smoke from a perennially burning fire on the floor cured the fish.

 After seven to eight weeks, the herring were taken down, decapitated, skinned, gutted, deboned, split in half and packed into wooden boxes to be shipped all over the world.

Wooden shipping boxes.

The wooden packing boxes were put together by the workers during the winter months.

The workers who strung the herring on the herring sticks, and did the packing process were payed by how many herring they strung and packed.  When they had completed a batch of work, they would call for a “punch”.  The supervisor would inspect their work and punch their tally card.

By 1975, McCurdy’s was the last cold smoking commercial herring smokehouse operating in the United States.  

In the 1980s there was a botulism outbreak that was traced to whitefish in the Great Lakes. The poisoning had nothing to do with McCurdy’s, but in 1991 the Food and Drug Administration responded to the outbreak by demanding that McCurdy eviscerate his fish before salting and smoking them. That would have required $75,000 worth of new equipment.  McCurdy did not have the money and the smokehouse was closed.

In 1996, the decaying smokehouse was restored by the newly-formed Lubec Landmarks.

This was a wonderful museum.  Our guide very knowledgeable and entertaining.  There were no souvenirs to buy but if there had been, this museum would be magnet worthy!