Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until 1991, herring were smoked on the Lubec Narrows in smokehouses using a traditional process with European roots. At the peak of Lubec's herring industry in the 1920s, the town had more than 20 sardine canneries and almost 30 herring smokehouses. By the mid-1970s, McCurdy's stood alone as the last smokehouse still curing herring for markets around the country. When it closed in 1991, it was the last operating commercial herring smokehouse in the U.S., and commercial herring smoking then completely vanished in the U.S. The complex was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 for its significance as an industrial site where a unique trade was practiced. McCurdy's was also an important economic hub for the community when it closed, because the sardine canneries had already shut down. Its buildings preserve not only the last site of herring smoking, once one of the most important industries of downeast Maine, but also some of the only surviving buildings from the region's vanished working waterfront, where coal pockets, lumber wharves, ship chandleries, boat building yards, sardine canneries, and other smokehouses once lined the Water Streets of Washington County's coastal towns.