Once one of the largest canneries in the United States, the site had fallen into disrepair in recent decades and many of the warehouses were torn down.
But today the remaining buildings are humming again, after a Maryland cannabis firm spent tens of millions of dollars refurbishing them for its operations, bringing about 125 new jobs to the area.
“These old structures are nearly 100 years old, so they’re extremely sturdy, and all we have to do is make sure we can work them for our purposes,” said Jay Bouton, director of cultivation at Culta, which launched in the Chesapeake Bay town in 2015.
“We were able to find land that was perfect for what we needed,” Bouton told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, standing in a warehouse among hundreds of carefully tagged cannabis plants.
The US cannabis industry is undergoing massive growth, spurred by a spate of legal changes in recent years.
That includes in the November elections, when four more states joined the 11 that have already approved the drug for adult recreational use.
Although marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, the industry is expected to be worth more than $38 billion by 2025, according to analysis group New Frontier Data.
Cities are increasingly seeking to tap into that market not only by taxing the sale of cannabis products, but also, like Cambridge, by promoting the use of aging industrial properties and…
