Events at Member Institutions

Lincoln County Historical Association's annual day camp for kids, Summer with the Past, Discovering 18th and 19th Century Art, Crafts and History is again offered for children ages 7 through 11.  This year’s sessions will be held at the Chapman-Hall House in Damariscotta, June 26 – June 30, and at the 1811 Old Jail and Museum in Wiscasset, August 7 - 11.  

The children will be introduced to each site’s unique history and enjoy a variety of projects and games popular in the 18th and 19th Centuries.  These activities vary depending on the time frame of the historic site.  Included in the activities planned for both sites are art and textile projects, and unique craft work.  In support of summer reading, each child can choose an historical theme book to borrow for the week.  The books have been chosen based on their historical themes, and/or their relevance to Maine.

Pre-registration is required, further details and registration information can be found on the LCHA website:  www.lincolncountyhistory.org  - click on Learn and scroll down to Youth Programs. To request information to be mailed to you, please contact LCHA by phone (207 882-6817), write LCHA at, Post Office Box 61, Wiscasset, ME  04578, or e-mail at info@lincolncountyhistory.org  Space is limited, so please register early.

Photo Caption:  A participant at the Summer with the Past program copies 18th century textile art. Photo by Louise T. MIller.

Incredible gardens in Lincoln County villages will be open to visitors over two days this summer. “The Gardens of Lincoln County,” hosted by Lincoln County Historical Association (LCHA), includes self-guided tours of special gardens in Dresden, Wiscasset, Newcastle, Damariscotta, and Round Pond on Friday June 30 and Saturday July 1.

“The Gardens of Lincoln County” will showcase a variety of garden styles including perennial gardens, cottage style gardens, working gardens, historically-inspired gardens, and gardens that express a particularly special personal design.

Tickets to the garden tour will include free admission for a tour at any of LCHA's historic museums: The 1754 Chapman-Hall House in Damariscotta, the 1761 Pownalborough Court House in Dresden, and the 1811 Old Jail and Museum in Wiscasset.

Tickets may be purchased in advance for $30 for one day or $50 for both. Visit https://www.lincolncountyhistory.org/garden-tour for more information and to order tickets.

Proceeds from Gardens of Lincoln County will support the ongoing work of Lincoln County Historical Association to collect, preserve, and interpret the history of Lincoln County, Maine.

Pownalborough Court House in Dresden is one stop on Lincoln County Historical Association's summer garden tour. Photo by Bob Bond.

The yard of the Old Jail will come alive with rock ’n roll music by Gary Lawless and his band, Leopard Girls. Bring a picnic and a blanket or lawn chairs. Cookout fare will also be offered, including hot dogs, veggie burgers, chips & water for a  nominal fee. Pre-registration is requested. Admission is $5 for adults; kids free. Children must be accompanied by an adult. Tickets may be purchased at https://www.lincolncountyhistory.org/jailhouse-rock/.

Gary Lawless has dug deep into his repertoire for jailhouse tunes, including I Fought The Law, I Shot the Sheriff, Jailhouse Rock, Folsom Prison, Mama Tried, Whipping Post, Unchain My Heart and more!!. There will be lawn games for all ages, and a chance to meet new neighbors.

The Lincoln County Historical Association is a non-profit organization that provides stewardship for the 1754 Chapman-Hall House in Damariscotta, the 1761 Pownalborough Court House in Dresden, and the 1811 Old Jail and Museum in Wiscasset.  For more information, visit www.lincolncountyhistory.org or Lincoln County Historical Association (Maine) on Facebook.

Join Skowhegan History House Museum & Research Center for A Conversation with Penobscot Artist Barry Dana. 

Thursday, June 8 at 7pm, in person at the Margaret Chase Smith Library, 56 Norridgewock Ave, Skowhegan.

Barry will share his process in creating a beautiful new mural commissioned by the Skowhegan History House depicting life along the Kennebec prior to European contact. This will be an open ended conversation about history and culture along the Kennebec.  He will offer visual representations of his experience of his culture, his tradition and the natural world.

Barry Dana was born and raised on Indian Island. He is a self taught painter, birch bark basket maker, educator and former chief of the Penobscot Nation. After graduating with a forestry degree from UMO, he got a degree in education and for 14 years taught a course to strengthen the connection with nature and culture for the elementary school children on Indian Island. This course evolved to his current school visit program that has taken him all over the state to share his culture and traditions with non-native children of all ages. He has dedicated his whole life to preserving Wabanaki culture and language through his school visits and through his basket making and painting.

This talk is a part of Skowhegan History House's Wabanaki Voices Speaker Series. 

FMI: visit https://skowheganhistoryhouse.org/speaker-series/ or call (207) 474-6632.

The Skowhegan History House Museum & Research Center is pleased to announce that Mali Obomsawin is the next speaker in its Wabanaki Voices Speaker Series.  On Thursday June 15 at 7pm, Mali Obomsawin presents the living Wabanaki history of the Kennebec River region and its people from before European arrival to the colonial era (up to present) and the LandBack movement in Maine and beyond.

Obomsawin's tribal historic preservation research focuses on Abenaki community history and its intersections with other Wabanaki nations in the modern-day US. The Abenaki of today make up two federally recognized First Nations (Odanak and W8linak) in Canada, but originally come from homelands in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Mali Obomsawin is a musician, writer, and community organizer originally from Farmington, Maine and a citizen of Odanak First Nation (Abenaki). She currently serves as executive director of Bomazeen Land Trust, an inter-tribal Wabanaki initiative dedicated to land return, rematriation, and food sovereignty across Wabanaki homelands. Mali also works as a consultant and writer with Sunlight Media Collective and is committed to telling stories at the intersections of environmental justice, history, and tribal sovereignty through her work. Her writings have also been published in The Boston Globe and Smithsonian Folklife Magazine. Mali holds a dual degree in Government and Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College (2018).

This event is free and takes place at Tewksbury Hall on Weston Avenue in Skowhegan and will also be broadcast via Zoom.

Join by Zoom here: https://bit.ly/45Azt2m or visit https://skowheganhistoryhouse.org/speaker-series/

FMI: (207) 474-6632

Portland---Come celebrate the opening of the Tate House’s 2023 season on Saturday, June 3 rd from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM (rain date Sunday June 4). We’ll be doing COLONIAL up big with lots of fun activities for the whole family. Our special guest is Colonial Reenactor Michael Dekker who will describe Native-Colonist trade in the 17 th and 18 th centuries with his Living History Mobile Museum. Michael is the author of French and Indian Wars in Maine and he will be engaging folks all day with his extensive knowledge of the time period.

Colonial games and activities for children will be offered from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM while one-hour docent-led tours of the Tate House will commence at 10 AM, 11 AM and 12 noon. There will be a backyard performance of colonial-dressed characters-- Tate Family & Neighbors--from 1:00 to 2:00 PM. Other exhibits include Herbs and Plants of the Colonial Garden and Herbal Tea Tasting from 10:00-12 noon. Historic textile aficionado Vivian Cunningham will be demonstrating 18 th century clothing throughout the day.

Special tours by our consulting curator, Laura Sprague, and executive director, Holly K Hurd,will highlight NEW collections and tour narratives, including Native baskets and the work of a domestic servant who was probably enslaved. These tours will occur every half hour from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Docent Bill Gousse will offer an Architectural Tour at 2:30 PM whichprovides at look at the Tate House attic and cellar, not included on a regular tour.

The cost for the day’s activities is $18 for adults, $7 for children under 12 years and $35 for families with children. Member prices are $15 adults, $5 children, and $30 for families.

Come join in the fun and experience this unique museum with its colonial trappings LIVE!

Tate House Museum will be open for regular house tours on Wednesday June 7. Please visit our website for advance tickets and information: www.tatehouse.org.

Atlantic Coast Preparedness Workshop Series (in-person) – https://www.nedcc.org/acpw 
Portland Art Museum, Maine, August 17th  
Greetings from the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). I am reaching out to share information about NEDCC’s Atlantic Coast Preparedness Workshop series. Eight low-cost workshops for cultural heritage organizations, emergency management personnel, and government departments along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, funded partly by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These in-person workshops provide the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience with salvage techniques for formats commonly found in cultural collections, including books, documents, photographs, and audiovisual materials. Dates and locations for each state are on the project page.    

Portland --- It’s that time of year again when fingers are itching to get out into the garden. On May 20 from 9:00 AM to 1:00 pm the Tate House Museum at 1267 Westbrook St., Portland invites you to shop for perennials and annuals for your garden. New this year: Native Plants for sale! Children (and all ages) are invited to make a native plant “seed bomb.” The Tate House kitchen will be open from 10 am to 12 noon with a special garden-themed display and information about plant use by the Tate family.

This popular plant sale features perennials and herbs divided from the Tate House garden along with perennials and native plants from local gardens. There will also be a variety of annual flowers, vegetable seedlings, and hanging baskets to choose from. This can be your one-stop shop for the garden this year! Come and enjoy a cup of coffee while you pick out those special plants.

Proceeds from the sale support the educational mission of Tate House Museum, the only colonial period public museum in Cumberland County.

FMI: Contact Holly K. Hurd

Tate House Museum

1267 Westbrook Street

Portland, ME 04102

hkhurd@tatehouse.org

207-774-6177

April 18, 5:00PM-6:30PM | Attend live via Zoom: REGISTER HERE

Join us for a free virtual screening of "Bounty" followed by a conversation with filmmakers and educators.

Bounty, part of the Upstander Project's Dawnland film series, reveals the hidden story of the Phips Proclamation, one of many scalp-bounty proclamations used to exterminate Native people in order to take their land in what is now New England. In the film, Penobscot parents and children resist erasure and commemorate survival by reading and reacting to the government-issued Phips Proclamation’s call for colonial settlers to hunt, scalp, and murder Penobscot people.

Following the screening, moderator Jared Lank,Mi’kmaq documentary filmmaker, will engage a panel including Dawn Neptune Adams, Penobscot filmmaker and journalist, Sunlight Media Collective, Bounty co-director/participant; Zev Bliss, Educator for Portland Public Schools; and Mishy Lesser,Learning director, Upstander Project, co-director, the Upstander Academy, and Emmy® award-winning researcher, in a conversation about the the film.

Place Justice is a statewide truth-seeking and historical recovery initiative of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations that seeks to engage Wabanaki and Maine communities in examining a wide range of commemorative practices to better understand and respond to the ways in which racialized and Indigenous populations are represented in or absent from the narratives inscribed on our natural and built environment.

The Place Justice Event Series features free, virtual and in-person panel discussions and film screenings to engage the public in considering some often complex and contentious issues. Whose stories are being told and whose suppressed? Whose legacies are being forwarded, and at whose expense? 

Learn more about the Permanent Commission, the Place Justice Project, and the full event series.

Contact us with your questions: placejusticemaine@gmail.com

Julia Bouwsma, Maine poet Laureate, will do a reading of new and published poems, followed by a Q&A session. Julia lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian, and Maine’s current Poet Laureate. Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received Maine Literary Awards for Poetry Book. Other honors include the Poet’s Out Loud Prize (2016-17), the Cider Press Review Book Award (2015), and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts (Monson, ME), Annex Arts (Castine, ME), and Storyknife (Homer, AK). She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington.  Tickets are free with a suggested donation of $10.00. https://www.rufusportermuseum.org/event-details/readings-and-q-a-with-maine-poet-laureate-julia-bouwsma