National Register #15000739
Aeneas Sardine Packing Company Cannery
300 Cannery Row
Monterey
Built 1945

For the first half of the 20th century, Cannery Row was the international center for sardine fishing and canning. World War II created demand for additional canneries including the Aeneas Cannery.

The Aenean Sardine Products Company was founded in 1945 by Frank Lucido and Orazio Enea. At some point, the name of the company was changed to Aeneas Sardine Products Company.

Completed in 1945, the Aeneas facility was typical of canneries on the row. One building housed a cannery and a second building across the steet housed a warehouse. The two buildings were connected by a crossover.

The Aeneas cannery is a three-story, board-formed, reinforced concrete building with considerable bulk and mass. The east elevation, facing Monterey Bay, housed a fish ladder to convey the sardine catch from fish storage pens up to the processing floor. A crossover connected the cannery to a warehouse across the street. This crossover is the only remaining one of the sixteen original crossovers that spanned Cannery Row during the heyday of fish production.

Following World War II, overfishing led to the end of Cannery Row by the mid-1950s.

The Aeneas Cannery is the last intact cannery, with its original crossover bridge, on Cannery Row.

Source: Adapted from the NRHP nomination submitted in 2015.

I could not determine when or why the name was changed from Aenean to Aeneas, but the horse on the crossover looks very much like a Trojan horse and suggests an homage to the mythological Aeneas who was one of the few Trojans not killed during the Trojan War.

Aeneas traveled from Troy to Italy by way of Carthage. He was an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.