Penobscot Marine Museum: The Town That Crewed a Nation
Near Camden, Maine
In the mid eighteen hundreds, a remarkable share of the adult men in Searsport, Maine were working mariners. Not a fisherman or a coastal boatman, but a deep-water sailor on oceangoing vessels. The town's waterfront had seventeen shipyards in the nineteenth century and built two hundred ships.
By square mile, Searsport supplied more deep-water captains to the United States merchant marine than any other community in the country, one in ten of the nation's total. The Penobscot Marine Museum, founded in nineteen thirty-six on a three-acre campus of thirteen historic buildings including several original sea captains' homes, was created to preserve that history. Its collections include a large archive of historic photographs, maritime artifacts, ships' logs, and an extensive research library.
The museum tells not just the story of sailing ships but of the global trade networks that connected this small Maine town to every significant port on earth during the age of sail.
