Tremont Historical Society

This aerial photo of Bass Harbor shows the back of the Bass Harbor Country Store and Museum, the former Underwood sardine factory, which has been converted into condominiums, and the working fishing harbor and wharf.

When the steam whistle blew at the Underwood sardine factory in McKinley (now Bass Harbor) it signaled that the sardine carriers had landed with their catch. The small herring were caught in seining nets and weirs, loaded into dories, and rowed to Underwood’s waiting sardine carriers, which transported the catch to the factory to be processed.

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At the end of a long day the women and men who worked at Underwood’s could stop at Richardson’s General Store, across the street from the factory, to pick up a flake of salt cod and a few potatoes for dinner, or maybe a paper of pins for the sewing basket and some hard candy for the kids. They might also have deposited their paychecks in the Tremont Savings Bank, which was located in the store, or checked for mail at the little post office window. Sitting on the big front porch, they could socialize with their friends and neighbors before heading home.

In the 19th century, the store also provisioned sailing vessels for off-shore fishing trips, providing all the supplies a vessel might need for its long journey.

After a century of being the lifeblood of the Tremont community, overfishing brought the herring industry to a close. The Underwood factory went through several incarnations in the mid-20th century, having been used for various enterprises including blueberry packing and making mouse food for Jackson Laboratory, before closing its doors.

The once indispensable little country store closed its doors too, with the end of factory workers flowing past its front door and with competition from another, larger general store up the road that had a movie theater and dance floor on its second floor!

But the story was not over for the store or the factory.

Although no longer a necessity in their lives, Tremont residents had an abiding fondness for the charming old store and rallied to save the building in the 1960s and turn it into a museum. Seeing an opportunity to preserve local history and tell the stories of the community, it became a repository for the tools, kitchen utensils, clothing, fishing gear, and other items that people in the 19th and 20th centuries used in their everyday lives at work and home.

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