Lubec, Maine

Part I: How They Smoked Herring in Lubec

Section 1: A Traditional Process in Traditional Buildings

Preparing smoked herring was a traditional process, that is, one that changed little in its essentials through the years. It was almost entirely handwork, with hardly any mechanical assist. This was not a process people went to school to learn about or read a book on how to do. Rather, they learned from their fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles, all the people who had worked in the smokehouses. They worked right along with them. It was no different for the owners who were generally their own managers. They too, as John McCurdy, learned from family members how to manage the manifold aspects of the business with skill and understanding. In short, a traditional transmission of culture was vital to the continuance of this industry.

Fortunately, a few people took it upon themselves toward the end of the industry to record in word and photograph how the herring were turned into tasty ready-to-eat smoked fish. There was Rosemary Ranck, who at some point in 1975, walked into McCurdy’s. There she photographed two workers in the Brining Room who have been identified as Leeman Wilcox and Richard Munson. They look up from the work of pickling the herring. The two were working in traditional space that could have been in a daguerreotype made in a building of the 1850s, if ever an early photographer had made to Lubec. Compare this with a photograph of the Brining Room in Part II made by Frank Van Riper in 1990. Except for the electric light bulbs and plastic baskets, the Brining Room was basically the same traditional space.

The buildings in a “stand” were traditional. Some call them examples of vernacular or folk architecture. It is all the same thing. The most important of these was the smokehouse itself. A keen observer, Ansley Hall, in the 1890s in Lubec recorded in words the traditional features. A folk vocabulary of the industry emerges. The building was divided up into “houses,” generally three of them, and further, into “bays” with “rails” in them. Above the ground level, the smokehouse had a series of “windows.” (P. 455). Today, the unknowledgeable might call them “doors,” since there are no casements in them. The place described might have been in Lubec or Eastport. Hall did not differentiate in his account. However, a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution, T. W. Smillie, had taken a photograph in 1886 that probably was the smokehouse Hall described.

Continuity of form and function is in evidence one hundred years later. Van Riper’s photograph shows the South Smokehouse with the row of “windows” painted the bright red that John McCurdy favored. On the roof peak there was a fixed ventilator. Inside was the gravel floor of the sort Hall had seen “for the area has to be used for the fires.” (P. 455). McCurdy, himself, has spoken of the “houses” within the smokehouses proper. The South Smokehouse in the photograph may be similar to the larger smokehouses of the sort Hall saw, for even in the 1890s, there were a few of this size.

A Pickling or Brining Shed was another building traditionally needed in a herring “stand,” beside the smokehouse proper. McCurdy’s was at the usual functional location, out at the end of the wharf on long pilings, on the right in Van Riper’s photograph. This was so that herring could be unloaded even at lower tides. It was here that what are interpreted in Part II as the first three steps in the process took place.

In Jacob B. Pike’s photograph the viewer looks into the center of the “stand” with the Pickling Shed in the distance at the end of the wharf. The North Smokehouse that was destroyed in a storm in 1995 has wood for the fires stacked up against it. In the left foreground is the Skinning/Packing Shed where the activities involved in the last step went on.