News
Maine has a long and enduring maritime tradition, and we are proud to call the Pine Tree State our home. Since the Fall of 2021, we have been located on Rockland Harbor at the mouth of Penobscot Bay. Home to a Coast Guard station, an impressive group of museums and a lively art scene, Rockland is perfectly situated on Maine's mid-coast.
Find us at the Sail, Power & Steam Museum Complex at 75 Mechanic Street, adjacent to Snow Marine Park and the terminus of Rockland's Harborwalk.
Open hours: Saturdays and Sundays year-round from 12-4. Other hours by appointment. Please call ahead, since we are sometimes off-site doing programs! Our phone is 207-390-5909.
We were the featured cover story article in the March 2022 edition of Down East Dog News. https://downeastdognews.villagesoup.com and have received great publicity via radio and the press since our arrival. Our museum has several portable exhibits available to travel: Lighthouse Mascots, Overview of Maritime Pets, Irish Maritime Pets and others. We also offer talks to groups, libraries and clubs about working and companion maritime pets, maritime heroes and famous mascots.
In addition to presenting on-line lectures, our staff contributes to blogs, book reviews and other services to the field. We also maintain our social media outreach and contacts with the wider maritime and scholarly communities.
Plans during the 2023-25 period include digitizing our library and photo archival collections. To that end, we welcomed two graduate interns from the Museum and Library Sciences program at San Jose State University. Sarah started a catalog of our photo archive (compriging hundreds of images, it represents our primary collection). Dylan catalogued our regular objects collection and also contributed research about some of our photos.
Our work could simply not be done without these wonderful volunteers! This Fall, Dylan has opted to ocntinue volunteering for us to produce an eventual online exhibit. He will also be researching two new areas of interest which will be reflected in future talks and exhibits.
We are also happy to welcome Tyler, from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana MLIS graduate program. He will be continuing on with our image cataloguing project, and doing research related to Latin America. That continent, with its extremely long coastline and varied maritime heritages, is a new area we hope to investigate with his help.
During the 2020-21 pandemic period, we expanded our virtual volunteer force and recently concluded several projects as part of our Second Decade Initiative. These included cataloguing our Library and developing resource lists of maritime organizations around the world by region.
In 2019, the Museum's founder participated in the first international Maritime Animals conference, held in Greenwich UK at the National Maritime Museum. Patricia Sulivan discussed the museum's mission and presented an overview of the types and functions of maritime pets throughout the ages.
Sullivan shared her east and west-bound ocean crossings with a Black Lab service dog who has accompanied her owner on several voyages. Many ocean liners roll out the red carpet for such dogs, and we salute them all!
During her time in the UK, Sullivan visited colleagues at various maritime museums and ports of call. Buster, the history dog from Plymouth University, and Hatch from the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth were just two of many furry and human friends she met up with.
The museum's dory, "Noah's Barque" found a new home in 2019. She performed very well on the water, but the boat was too unstable to use for pet demonstrations and educational events.
Podcasting gained in popularity in 2020-21 as museums and other organizations sought ways to keep their profiles and messages front and center in the public eye. We were featured on a May 13, 2021 episode of The Mariner's Mirror, devoted to maritime history. Visit the Society for Nautical Research and search the podcasts page. All episodes are available. www.snr.org
In recent years, we have been interviewed on one foreign and several national radio programs, and have been featured in comprehensive articles in Atlas Obscura, as well as Boating Times, Smithsonian Online Magazine, and the Washington Post. We contribute to several blogs on an invitation basis, and maintain an active exchange of information and images via social media.
In 2017, we circulated an exhibit on loan to us from CFB Esquimalt Museum (Canadian Navy) in Victoria BC. "Creature Comforts" featured mascots from the late 19th through mid 20th centuries. Our own maritime pets exhibit "All Paws on Deck" continues to travel on demand. It features several famous mascots, topical news and images, and a tribute to the pets who were aboard the Titanic on her fateful voyage in 1912.
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