PROSPECT HARBOR, Maine — The intensely fishy smell of sardines has been the smell of money for generations of workers in Maine who have snipped, sliced and packed small, silvery fish into billions of cans on their way to Americans' lunch buckets and kitchen cabinets.
For the past 135 years, sardine canneries have been as much a part of Maine's small coastal villages as the thick Down East fog. It's been estimated that more than 400 canneries have come and gone along the state's long, jagged coast.
The lone survivor, the Stinson Seafood plant here in this eastern Maine shoreside town, shuts down this week after a century in operation. It is the last sardine cannery not just in Maine, but in the United States.
Lela Anderson, 78, has worked in sardine canneries since the 1940s and was among the fastest in sardine-packing contests that were held back in the day. Her packing days are over; now she's a quality-control inspector looking over the bite-sized morsels in can after can that passes by her.
Read the complete AP story at Google.