Deb Ethier of Wiscasset was going through her late mother Phyllis Reed’s things in an attic on Huntoon Hill Road when she came across a lobster claw that had been in the family since before Ethier, 61, was born. Ethier said all she remembers ever being told about it was that her mother’s father, Philip Pinkham, caught the lobster when he worked for Lusty Lobster in Bremen.

Visiting the Main Street Pier in Wiscasset recently, she saw the assorted lobster claws on display at Sprague’s Lobster and decided to offer the business’ owner Frank Sprague the old claw. Sprague, interviewed separately, said Ethier wouldn’t take any money for it.

Ethier said she only took a bottle of water off Sprague in exchange for the claw. She just wants people to enjoy seeing it there. “And I love Frank, anyway,” she said, laughing on the phone Monday night.

“It’s amazing,” Savannah, Georgia’s Janie Bunger said about the claw Friday, after she and husband of 38 years Archie Bunger looked at and photographed it. They don’t have lobsters where they live, she added. The couple, traveling following his retirement from the paper industry, had come to Wiscasset for a Red’s Eats lobster roll.

Showing the Wiscasset Newspaper the claw Friday morning, Sprague said based on its size, he estimates the lobster was 17-18 pounds and about 100 years old when caught all those decades ago. “That would put (the lobster) pre-Civil War,” or thereabouts, he said. “I think it’s great. We’re in the lobster business, and this (claw) has some local history to it. That’s what I like about it.”

Asked how the big lobster likely tasted, Sprague figured it may have been on the tough side. A lot of people like big lobsters, though, he said.

Ethier has never liked lobster, but her mother did. So now Ethier makes a point to have it on her mother’s birthday or on Mother’s Day.

Ethier is also the daughter of the late Wiscasset Wastewater Treatment Plant supervisor Arthur Reed. She said she feels awesome about people getting to see the family’s old lobster claw.