In my efforts to create some educational resources that The Curran Homestead can use in its outreach to local schools, I have been developing a relationship with some local historical societies and soliticited willing participants to share their personal experiences and histories. In addition to the material culture we have at the Homestead, we have struck on the idea of attaching a voice to both the farm and its holdings of tools and equipment. An ice saw, for instance, doesn't have much educational value unless we can demonstrate how it may have been used and attach some voices of experiences to it.
The idea is that The Homestead's holdings will contribute much more and be more attractive to audiences if we can attach story to them. Using free downloaded software, inexpensive digital recorders, and free website space like blogspot. com and podcastgo.com, I have discovered a means to further disseminate our message and our resources to greater numbers via the Internet. This in no way will subordinate the things we already do, but it will add to it. Such digital and Internet resources, as current scholarship tells us, will only increase the desirability of visiting real sites like our own the more.
I have started recording conversations with local people who have a story to tell about the area's past. Some of these are directly linked to the farm, the Currans, Fields Pond, and Orrington of yore. Some are not connected specifically with our site or to the family farm but of life as it was in rural Maine, and The Homestead has and will continue to serve as a steward of that more generalized history too and make the knowledge of that time and place available for new generations and our time.
To start the ball rolling, I recently taped some three hours with Henry Wiswell of Orrington. Mr. Wiswell has a wealth of knowledge about the area's past and farm life of the 40s until the present. His memories also include stories handed down to him from his own elders about life as it was beyond his own lifespan. Much of our recorded conversation made a connection with his own extentive collection of antique tools and farm implements and his life on a family farm in Orrington. These memories have a direct connection with our own holdings of material culture and the identity of our site.
I plan on making an edited version of my conversation with Henry Wiswell available online with photographs of the material culture he speaks of. The longer unedited version ( that will be slightly "cleaned-up" excluding background noise and interference) will be also be available upon request by those wishing to use it for research or further educational purposes. In addition, Mr. Wiswell has worked in recent years to create a printed text that includes his recollections of Maine farm life. These vignettes include such titles as "Skunk Scare," "Soap Making," "Chores," "Potatoes," and the like. I recently spoke with Mr. Wiswell about the possibility of having him read these so that I will have these rich in educational value resources in his own voice. These too would be valuable for the proposed online resource.
As you know, we recently completed two Maine State Archives grants. One of these is an oral history project that includes proposed conversations with Bob Robinson of the Split Rock Forge in Stockton Springs. The grant application we submitted is below on this blog for your perusal. What this will entail is some 25 hours with Mr. Robinson at his forge. He will talk about the tools and equipment he uses in his forge. These conversations will include such things as how, for example, he lights the forge and brings it to the desired temperature to bend and shape metal, among other valuable details about how forges function and how they served the public of the past. Mr. Robinson is thoroughly knowledgeable of the history and application of blacksmithing in general and locally. These conversations will connect with our own holdings of blacksmithing tools and equipment, and, if we get the desired funding we have applied for, our own onsite blacksmithing shed that we have proposed to construct during the summer of 2009.
Our planned "Ice Harvesting Step-Back" is an activity designed to create a situation whereby we use the ice harvesting tools from our holdings in a hands-on learning experience. In our preliminary discussion at the recent board meeting we proposed that we drill several holes in the ice on Fields Pond the night before we meet using a drill auger. We will use these holes as the starting point from which we saw an ice block using one of our two ice saws. we will use a pair of ice tongs to lift the block from the icy water.
Included below is an article that appeared in the July, 1894 edition of DeMorest's Family Magazine recounting how commercial ice harvesting was done. Commmercial ice harvesting was an integral part of worklife in 1890s Orrington. Mr.Wiswell's family had a stake in a major commercial ice harvesting operation, and the Currans or their forebearers of the farm likely had their own smaller enterprise, given the sizeable ice house structure extant on the property. Because we lack all the necessary equipment to recreate how commercial ice harvesting would have been done as detailed in the DeMorest's article, we hope to merely recreate an approximation of how a smaller operation may have realized a block of ice for refrigerating purposes. It will not be of the quality required by urban consumers in the 1890s.
The plan is to cut a block or two and transport them up to the kitchen of the Curran House where one will be placed in the period ice box donated by Cathy Martinage. We will remove the block at that time, for it is only to demonstrate the action on videotape for educational purposes. We will videotape the whole experience and samplings of it will be made available online through one of our blogs, our facebook account, or our website.
Having mentioned the ice harvesting project at the January 13, 2009 meeting of the Brewer Historical Society where I recently spoke, one member offered some information about his own memories of ice block refrigeration. Apparently, there were still some ice harvesters and block suppliers right up until the 1950s in our area. There was one, according to this source, by the name of "Hanscom" who ran such an enterprise in the Brewer area in the 50s. My source knew that the family was still in the area, and that there is a potential for a recorded oral history there if one were to make the overtures to the family.
I was very excited by the BHS meeting, for I was privy to much history that I should have recorded in the past. Having such a learning experience, it is my intention to regularly attend future BHS meetings because there is so much potential for off-the-cuff discussions with those who experienced history first-hand. A formal sit-down for the purpose of taping an oral history requires preparation, planning, and often delay that threatens this resource from ever being realized. So it is my intention to try to do both the taping of conversations at meetings in the future and one-on-one sit-down recordings.
One BHS member was intrigued by the idea, and its potential contribution to already existing projects in the area. He mentioned the work Galen Cole has been doing in regard to World War II veterans speaking with area school children at the Cole Transportation Museum in Bangor. This has been a high profile educational project as many of you have seen the press coverage. The BHS member suggested that an effort might be made to record some of these conversations between kids and the veterans; they presently are not recorded. Irv Marsters had also recently explored this idea in a conversation with me. I met Lawrence "Bud" Lyford at the meeting who, in addition to his experience as a local hardware store owner for 40 years, served in battle during WWII. Our ten minute plus conversation should have been taped for it was stuff that good oral histories are made of, but I plan to meet with Mr. Lyford in the weeks to come.
The record of the family farm in twentieth century history is seemingly incomplete given its prominent role in the lives of so many and the threat of their increasing disapearance from the landscape in our own time. it is still possible to add to the historical record about the role of the family in The Great Depression and WWII through oral history gathering, but given the age of those who experienced it first hand the next five years in critical to such a project.Farmers were not required to do military service during WWII, for example, because it was believed that food production was just as important as military service during wartime, first-hand accounts of the farmer's service during this era is one that has been understated.
In my own experience, I remember stories related to me by my maternal grandmother about my own grandfather's desire to join the Navy as a pilot trainee during World War II. The thought created tensions between my grandparents at the time; the argument being that if he were to go off to war he would be giving up the profitable dairy that both he and my grandmother had worked to acquire and maintain in their 6 years of farming up to that point. The idea was eventually abandoned after much argument. My grandfather developed his dairy during these wartimne years, while my grandmother worked at a DuPont Wartime Production Factory in Pompton Lakes, NJ inspecting the primers on artillery shells in order to save money to buy more cows. They eventually bought a large farm of 280 plus acres of their own after the war in 1947 from a Brooklynite ( who wasn't a farmer) who had seemingly purchased the farm in 1943 to take advantage of military dispensation.
In addition to the above circumstances which were by no means extraordinary, many veterans of World War II were the sons and daughters of farmers. This theme might be worth fucusing on if we were to develop a project to record the stories of surviving veterans from rural eastern Maine in particular. The themes explored in such a project could also connect to other occupations like ice harvesting, logging, maple sugaring, and bee keeping, to name a few, particular to this region. In one oral history interview recently done the interviewee shared his experiences ice harvesting weeks before being shipped off to the Pacific for active duty in 1942. Such interconnectedness of the lives of veterans with rural Maine heritage would be paramount to this project.
Lawrence "Bud" Lyford, who I met at the BHS meeting, was very interested in the idea of sharing his experiences as a WWII veteran and as the owner of a local hardware store for some 40 years. My argument is that access to the octogenarians that would make up the existing pool of WWII veterans participating in Galen Cole's project, which includes bringing area children with veterans for one-on-one question and answer experiences at the Cole Transportation Museum in Bangor would give us access to the earliest first-hand accounts of our community that we would ever hope to capture in an oral history project. The fact that veterans are sharing these stories in a situation already makes the next step of recording them a logical response especially when these numbers specifically with World War II experiences are declining. Such a project would allow a perpetuation of the sharing process between this "greatest generation" and succeeding generations.
What do we do with with these recordings once we have them? My idea is to eventually run a workshop at one or several schools for teachers. I have taught a course for teachers that focused on the use of primary source materials in the classroom through the State Archives and Records Administration in Albany, New York. I would like to introduce strategies for using oral histories in the classroom, and then allow teachers access to the oral histories we have created. Ideally they would pick one of these and create a series of lessons that relate to their current curriculum. I will be creating several model examples for teachers to understand and experience the concept, and how such a project can be applicable to theior classroom. The teachers would have lessons that they have created that make use of these primary source materials. We would make their lessons available in conjunction with the digital recordings online through our Internet presence.
We already have many oral history recordings that were done by the University of Maine in the 1990s on tape cassettes. These include cassettes with Alfred Curran, one of the museum's benefactors himself, as well as others that knew the Currans. I think it a safe bet that not many have or are listening to them, given that cassette players are on the technological wane (and this was recently confirmed by the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences who anticpates the need to digitalize much of the collections spearheaded by Sandy Ives). I am in the process of listening to all of these recordings. I plan to digitize them in the months to come and use them for the models for realizing some direct connections for their use in classroom curriculum for elementary, middle, and high school.
Jean (Schmick-Hopkins), my wife, has had experience with oral histories as a teaching tool as well. Jean was a co-recipient and a facilitator of the S.A.R.A Summer Institute grant with me, and she has some great ideas for realizing such a project with elementary school students having been a teacher of 4th and 5th grade for nearly 15 years and currently a 4th grade teacher at Fairmount Elementary School in Bangor.
David Hanna of the Brewer Historical Society recently sent me the following letter in response to my discussion about all of the above at the January 13, 2009 Brewer Historical Society meeting:
Bob: It is nice to meet with you last evening. You provided us with some exciting ideas. I do a newsletter for the historical society and plan to use this article. Would you please let me know if there is anything you don't like or would change. I am hoping that your oral history project will be successful, and that we can get some of our members to participate. I also would like to see local students somehow involved. Our students are just not adequately educated as to the history of our community. I have also written to Jeff Hamadey, our president, and Phyllis Scribner, our accessions clerk at the Clewley Museum, with the opinion that we could benefit from your expertise in using technology to help promote the museum and the society. Thank you again.
What is your Story??
Dr. Robert Schmick addressed the January 13th meeting of the BHS at Brewer Auditorium. Dr. Schmick's expertise is in developing new technologies for museums and is presently the Director of Education at the Curran Homestead Living History Farm and Museum. Presently he is obtaining oral histories of individuals in the area and will incorporate taped interviews with pictures into internet accessible programs. This means that an important link to the past will be made available to everyone. Students and members of the community can use present day technology to obtain information from those who have personal recollections of Brewer during the twentieth century and before. Dr. Schmick is willing to tap the history of our members as well as those in the community that have a story to tell.
An Opinion
I would hope that each member of the historical society would reflect on the legacy that could be left to the community of Brewer by contacting Dr. Schmick and discussing the possibility of being recorded for posterity. I am sure that each of you has a recollection of Brewer's past, be it of one of the industries such as lumbering, ice harvesting, brick making, ship building, Eastern Manufacturing, milling, or the myriad of other businesses. In addition you have recollections of events, and stories that could be passed down to future generations. I encourage you to contact Dr. Schmick at 843-5550 or reach him online at rpschmick1@aol.com
-----David Hanna
Cc: Jeff Hamadey
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
DeMorest's Family Magazine (July,1894), "A Day on a [an] Ice-Field," by Alvaro Adsitt
The rose vine which climbed the balcony thrusts a spray of creamy blossoms in at my window as if to remind me that it is midsummer. As I lean to smell of them, as one might lean to receive a kiss, there is a rumble and a clatter in the street below, and a yellow-covered vehicle thunders by, upon whose side I read the word "ICE" and straightway my thoughts revert to another and a far different scene and season.
__I see before me a wide expanse of gleaming ice upon which the sun glimmers with a thousand sparkles. Yonder, swaying to and fro as in some mystic dance, go a pair of skaters. If that athletic young man with the bold, black eyes has not yet won the petite fair-haired girl at his side who clings so closely to him, though she is evidently a practised skater, he is more modest than his face betokens. And see how like a frightened gull yonder ice-boat swoops down the wind, swift as the flight of the swallow, leaping and bounding over the hummocks like a greyhound that has sighted his prey!
And hark! From yonder group of men who seem to be so busily at work, comes faintly upon the frosty air a song, a choral as robust, as resonant, as those the sailors sing when their bark is preparing for sea. These are the ice-cutters. No pleasure-seekers these, no makers of festivals, no chevaliers of the ladies but journeymen of nature, laborers who win bread from the fiercest moods of winter, who brave death itself to wrest from the gnomes of the frost the refreshment of thousands while the dog-star rages and the great cities faint under the merciless noon.
__These men sing as they saw and chop and heave, because they are overflowing with health, and because to them the fierce breath that blows from under the North Star is sweeter than the balmy airs from the South; for the midwinter is their harvest time.Come nearer and observe them: big, brawny, honest-eyed fellows, wondering that you should shiver in your furs, though the thermometer marks close upon zero.
Yonder is one with arms bare to the elbows; here is another up to his waist in water upon which the frost-needles collect as he stands; and here is yet another, tugging at a huge cake of ice. Look at him with admiration if you have an eye for physical strength; how the knotted tendons in his great arms and wrists attest the man's vast power. And do you observe he is perspiring, even in this keen air?
__"It is warm work," he tells his neighbor with the ice-saw, who agrees with him.Even during the coldest winter there are but few days during which the ice-harvest may be reaped. The farther north, of course the longer the season; but the farther north you go the farther you get from the your market, and the greater the loss sustained in transportation and storage. So it is not surprising that these men work like engines under full pressure. Besides, as our burly friend, the foreman, observes,
__"You have got to keep movin' or freeze fast."
__Yonder, near the farther shore, where the ice-boats are flitting to and fro and the skaters are wheeling about, there is a narrow strip of ice that the wind has swept clear; but over the larger portion of the frozen expanse the snow has become packed down and partially amalgamated with the mass below.__"All this has to be scraped off before we can begin cutting," our lusty informant tells us. "You couldn't no more cut ice with that rubbish atop of it than you could make a born liar tell the truth, -and, I take it, there ain't nothin' tougher'n that."__A low laugh of rich enjoyment of his own aphorism comes somewhere from the good-natured human jelly, which shakes with the convulsion as if it would liquefy though the thermometer is at zero.
__A long line of horses, each drawing a framework of heavy plank shod with steel, approaches us solemnly. Over the edges of these frames, in general shape triangular with the opening forward, the loose snow rolls and foams like the froth before the bows of a ship.
After the snow is cleared away, the surface of ice beneath, which is more or less porous and uneven, is planed down until the clear, homogeneous body is reached. Sometimes as much as three inches of this "rotten ice" , as it is called, has to be scraped away._"Don't stand still till ye freeze fast, boys," is the good-natured admonition of the foreman as the men pause to exchange a rude jest or a word of gossip and the smoking horses move on again in leisurely procession.
__Our friend tells us that ice must be perfectly clear, and from nine inches to one foot thick, if for home use, and at least twenty inches thick if it is to be exported; since, not withstanding the careful provision made for preserving it, from one-quarter to one-half its weight is lost in transport.
__Where we stand upon this hillock of snow we command a view of the whole busy scene. Ice cutting and harvesting are carried on by exclusively American methods, and with American tools and machinery.__"Who else but Americans could have invented them there?" says our friend, proudly pointing to the saws, plows, harrows, and similar apparatus before us. "Ice is an American institution. English ice is full of holes and so soft it melts if you speak loud; and as for the rest of Europe (he pronounces it "Yurrup") it hain't in sight. In Norway I believe they do have some little fair ice; but one New York hotel would use up the whole crop."
He goes on to tell us that New York and Brooklyn alone use in the neighborhood of three million tons a year, and that we export vast quantities to all parts of the world, in ships built especially for the purpose. __By this time the workmen have taken up their positions near the center of the lake, and the cutting begins. We learn that the ice in the middle of lakes and streams is always harder and purer than that near the shore and is stored by itself as a superior grade. Ice produced in the deep waters of Northern New York and Northern New England is all of high grade; that cut in the Kennebec River is the most celebrated.
__The first process in the cutting is the measuring out of a large square very accurately, the lines being deeply incised with an ice plough. Next, the original square is "marked" in smaller squares or, rather, oblongs, of a known size, generally twenty-four by thirty inches."It won't do to work by rule o'thumb," says the foreman. "The cakes have to be packed exactly, with no waste room. Besides, we can tell to a pound what each cake weighs when we take it out."
__The marker is a sort of harrow drawn by a horse, and provided at the back with an upright which serves both as a guide and as a handle upon which a man walking behind bears his weight so as to cause the teeth with which the left side of the marker is set to bite into the ice as it runs. The right side is a thin runner of steel. This runner is set into one of the plowed lines of the square, the horse is started and the machine travels across the field, the teeth cutting a deep furrow parallel with the side of the square.
Another marker, with its runner set in the groove cut by the teeth of the first, follows, making a second groove. When the square has been marked off thus in one direction, the toothed blades are adjusted to a narrower gauge, and a series of grooves are cut at right angles to the first set. Some markers are provided with several sets of saw-teeth, so that two or more grooves are cut at one time. Those shown in the illustration are of the simpler construction.
Now come the plows. They look like a sort of compound agricultural plow. Into a long, heavy beam are set eight separate blades, or shares, each notched at the bottom. Every plow is drawn by a single horse, and guided by ordinary plow-handles. The blades are set in the grooves made by the markers, and the plowing begins. Is it not a curious sight? See how the particles of ice spout up before the rending blades, like fountains of many-hued jewels blown gracefully before the wind. The surface upon which we stand trembles beneath our feet with a dull, continuous, jarring sound.__The whole square has now been plowed into checkers, each space representing a cake. The next stage is "breaking out". Let us go closer to observe the details.
__"Shall we not be in the way?"__"No," responds the foreman, and "No," say the good-natured, smiling faces of these robust fellows. How is it that laboring or living out-of-doors always seems to make human nature more kindly and genial? - I believe better in every way.So we stand near by and watch these men handle their saws, ice-forks, - heavy, long-tined tridents, - ice hooks, and ice-spades. When a single cake has been broken out, the saw-men begin along the plowed lines, the curious, double-handled saw-blades sliding through the solid substance with marvelous rapidity.
When the ice is very thick the whole cake need not be sawed out; the forks and spades applied to the plowed grooves will cleave it away with perfect accuracy.__The ice is cut away in such a fashion that a long, narrow canal of open water is made, connecting with a water-way always kept free to the shore. As fast as the cakes are severed, men with long-handled hooks seize them and float them down the canal. Let us follow one of these cakes upon its journey.
Along the Hudson and on many lakes and streams, the storage houses are built with their feet in the water, so to say; and in such cases the canals float the ice directly beneath the apparatus which hoists the cakes into the houses. But at the place illustrated, Burlington, on Lake Champlain, the storage buildings are at some distance from the lakeside, and the breakwater intervenes, requiring a deal of sliding, teaming, and skidding before the ice reaches its resting-place.
Here is what looks like a sort of half-finished toboggan slide; a rude, slanting framework of heavy timbers up which the cakes are jerked and pushed, in rapid succession, to the crown of the breakwater, then allowed to rush down upon the opposite side, by dint of their own weight, with a whirr and a flash, till they are skillfully checked at the bottom by workmen ready to receive them as they come.
Pause a moment and note the scene before you. In the foreground, the slide, - not a beautiful object, it is true, though as to its usefulness the incessant clash of the descending cakes speaks loudly; at its foot, the workmen, the rude sledges and the heavy teams; beyond, the snow covered expanse; and still beyond, the snow-covered expanse; and still beyond, the ice-houses turning their peaked ends toward us, steamer landings, factories, sheds, long rows of buildings, a stately dwelling or two, a church spire, the faint blue smoke from tall chimneys, all backgrounded upon a hazy horizon of leafless, wintry-looking forest.
__Now let us go on. We cannot go down the slide, unless you are willing to take undignified passage on one of those swiftly coursing blocks of ice; so we must even crawl down the bank as best as we may, putting our scraped shins and bruised flesh down to the general account of the day's experience.
The rough but highly practicable double-runner sledges are drawn up in succession at the foot of the slide, and as the cakes come down, as if with a frenzied intent to shoot, like unchained meteors, into space beyond, they are deftlly caught, and meekly take their places upon the waiting vehicles. One of these sledges has just received its complement, and starts slowly away, drawn by a pair of stout, hog-maned, awkwardly built, white horses, which, like all of the equine race we have seen here, seem to take their toil philosophically, as a necessary, but not intolerable, evil. The driver stands behind his load, and is, apparently, as deliberate, philosophical, and good-natured as his team.
This load, our friend informs us, weighs seven thousand pounds, - three and a half tons; but then, as the foreman says, "sledding is a heap sight easier than wheeling."__The route from the lake to the storage-houses is between dreary-looking sheds and forbidding fences. It is altogether a depressing aspect. Broken blocks of ice, perhaps the evidences of previous disasters to sled-loads, strew the discolored and frozen track.
__Even the shouts and songs of the drivers as they urge their teams along cannot put cheerfulness into the hopelessly uncomfortable scene. It seems to us, bitter as was the cold upon the lake, that as we enter the court-yard before these enormous wooden erections, strengthened with giant timbers and bound with iron bands, where the ice is stored, the cold becomes more searching and merciless from the proximity of these thousands of tons of crystallized water. There are no windows visible, and nothing that you would call a door. The blank walls and shelving roofs have a repellent air.
__Some of these edifices have an amazing capacity. They hold all the way from twenty thousand to sixty thousand tons. Their walls are double, and the space between is filled with saw dust or other non-conducting material. Only a few boards and loose straw is interposed between the ice and the earth, and one layer is superposed immediately upon the other; but in some of the more improved storage-houses along the Hudson, the earth is coated with tanbark, and there is an additional plank sheathing on the wall packed with tan.
__The cakes are unloaded from the sledges upon a staging. Though these glistening oblongs are very heavy, the men with their long hooks whirl them hither and thither as if they were mere straws.__"It ain't the strength," explains the foreman, who still accompanies us, "it's the knowing the how of it. Put Samson himself up there on that staging for the first time, and tell him to spread himself on those cakes, and I'll venture he'd ask for an unlimited vacation after half an hour's work, besides busting half the cakes, barking his own shins, and smashing the toes of everybody around.
Ice has got to be coaxed; you can't drive it. If you set yourself to make it go one way, it'll be surely go the other; and if you use it rough, look out for legs! For it's bound to get square. But just you tickle it up a bit with your hook, kind of advise it to go the way you want, as if you were anxious for its best interests, and, bless you! You can send it spinning twenty yards wit a twist of your little finger. Just look there. See how that cake runs along, as if it knew where it was to go and was ready to oblige."
__This load, our friend informs us, weighs seven thousand pounds, - three and a half tons; but then, as the foreman says, "sledding is a heap sight easier than wheeling."__The route from the lake to the storage-houses is between dreary-looking sheds and forbidding fences. It is altogether a depressing aspect. Broken blocks of ice, perhaps the evidences of previous disasters to sled-loads, strew the discolored and frozen track.
__As the cakes slide across the staging from the sledges, they are gripped, put into a sling, and hoisted by an ordinary pulley tackle drawn by a team. Up go the masses with a creaking and groaning of blocks; the cake is disengaged and disappears within the dark recesses; the horses back and the sling comes down for another load; and so the hoisting and lowering goes on unremittingly all day.
__The Foreman listens with what seems to us an envious air as we tell him that we have seen ice-houses near the metropolis where the ice was drawn up by inclined plane by steam power and conveyed by other planes, ascending or descending, to all portions of the building, with lightning-like rapidity, so that gangs of twenty men, working vigorously, were scarce able to settle the cakes in place so swiftly did they arrive.__"Well," he observes, with a sigh, " we ain't come to that yet up here. But one thing I can tell you: steam h'isting don't make prime ice; no more do patent fixin's. And we've got prime ice, if we do have to store it by hand and horse-power.
New York's a great place, I allow, and it's got nigh about everything, I reckon; but it ain't got the climate to make first-class, A No. 1, gilt edged, no discount ice."__Having thus relieved his feelings he smiles good-naturedly, and, as if fearing he had wounded our local pride, adds:__"New York air about the center of creation, I'm bound to admit. My nephew Jabez Stephens spent a month there once, and ever since he won't wear nothin' but store clothes. He says a visit to New York is a 'liberal education' ; though after all he can't spell for shucks."
We are now in the ice-house itself. What a gloomy place! And what a deathlike chill strikes to the vitals from those frozen mountains on either hand, upon which the feeble rays of the outer day, finding their way in at the door, glint and sparkle with a weird lustre, such as we are told gleams about an arctic "pack."__We are glad to escape into an intermediate space between two buildings, across which runs a bridge-like gutter, along which men are skidding the ice. Propelled by men with hooks, the heavy cakes are sliding in quick succession with a rumbling noise.
__What manner of men are these that labor in shirt sleeves in those regions whose breath is vaporous ice, where, warmly clad as we are, the very flesh seems quivering upon our bones? Yet yonder robust fellow pauses to pass his arm across his perspiring forehead. And here comes another, wet from head to foot and trailing water after him at every step, - a trail which freezes almost as it falls! As he approaches the foreman he shows his white teeth in a broad smile.__"What's come to you, Joshua Smart?" asks our guide. "Ye look a bit damp."__"Yas, some so, boss," replies the newcomer. "Fell into the consarned canal. Got under the ice, too, and mighty nigh about tuckered out afore they pulled me up."
__"Well," says the foreman, "you must be a blamed fool not to know enough to keep out of the drink where ye've made your living since you were a shaver. Go home and get some dry duds on; and look you, Joshua, don't stop to gab on the way, or you might get cold.
__Joshua Smart departed with a loud slapping of sodden trousers; and presently, having seen all there was to see, we heartily thanked the foreman and made our exit in turn, highly gratified with the result of our expedition, but, at the same time, well pleased to return to a rousing fire of New England hickory logs, and a substantial New England supper which was eaten with appetite wholly unsectional, concluding with a plunge into a billowy New England feather bed, and the dreamless slumber which falls to the lot of the just and the tired.
Alvaro Adsit
__I see before me a wide expanse of gleaming ice upon which the sun glimmers with a thousand sparkles. Yonder, swaying to and fro as in some mystic dance, go a pair of skaters. If that athletic young man with the bold, black eyes has not yet won the petite fair-haired girl at his side who clings so closely to him, though she is evidently a practised skater, he is more modest than his face betokens. And see how like a frightened gull yonder ice-boat swoops down the wind, swift as the flight of the swallow, leaping and bounding over the hummocks like a greyhound that has sighted his prey!
And hark! From yonder group of men who seem to be so busily at work, comes faintly upon the frosty air a song, a choral as robust, as resonant, as those the sailors sing when their bark is preparing for sea. These are the ice-cutters. No pleasure-seekers these, no makers of festivals, no chevaliers of the ladies but journeymen of nature, laborers who win bread from the fiercest moods of winter, who brave death itself to wrest from the gnomes of the frost the refreshment of thousands while the dog-star rages and the great cities faint under the merciless noon.
__These men sing as they saw and chop and heave, because they are overflowing with health, and because to them the fierce breath that blows from under the North Star is sweeter than the balmy airs from the South; for the midwinter is their harvest time.Come nearer and observe them: big, brawny, honest-eyed fellows, wondering that you should shiver in your furs, though the thermometer marks close upon zero.
Yonder is one with arms bare to the elbows; here is another up to his waist in water upon which the frost-needles collect as he stands; and here is yet another, tugging at a huge cake of ice. Look at him with admiration if you have an eye for physical strength; how the knotted tendons in his great arms and wrists attest the man's vast power. And do you observe he is perspiring, even in this keen air?
__"It is warm work," he tells his neighbor with the ice-saw, who agrees with him.Even during the coldest winter there are but few days during which the ice-harvest may be reaped. The farther north, of course the longer the season; but the farther north you go the farther you get from the your market, and the greater the loss sustained in transportation and storage. So it is not surprising that these men work like engines under full pressure. Besides, as our burly friend, the foreman, observes,
__"You have got to keep movin' or freeze fast."
__Yonder, near the farther shore, where the ice-boats are flitting to and fro and the skaters are wheeling about, there is a narrow strip of ice that the wind has swept clear; but over the larger portion of the frozen expanse the snow has become packed down and partially amalgamated with the mass below.__"All this has to be scraped off before we can begin cutting," our lusty informant tells us. "You couldn't no more cut ice with that rubbish atop of it than you could make a born liar tell the truth, -and, I take it, there ain't nothin' tougher'n that."__A low laugh of rich enjoyment of his own aphorism comes somewhere from the good-natured human jelly, which shakes with the convulsion as if it would liquefy though the thermometer is at zero.
__A long line of horses, each drawing a framework of heavy plank shod with steel, approaches us solemnly. Over the edges of these frames, in general shape triangular with the opening forward, the loose snow rolls and foams like the froth before the bows of a ship.
After the snow is cleared away, the surface of ice beneath, which is more or less porous and uneven, is planed down until the clear, homogeneous body is reached. Sometimes as much as three inches of this "rotten ice" , as it is called, has to be scraped away._"Don't stand still till ye freeze fast, boys," is the good-natured admonition of the foreman as the men pause to exchange a rude jest or a word of gossip and the smoking horses move on again in leisurely procession.
__Our friend tells us that ice must be perfectly clear, and from nine inches to one foot thick, if for home use, and at least twenty inches thick if it is to be exported; since, not withstanding the careful provision made for preserving it, from one-quarter to one-half its weight is lost in transport.
__Where we stand upon this hillock of snow we command a view of the whole busy scene. Ice cutting and harvesting are carried on by exclusively American methods, and with American tools and machinery.__"Who else but Americans could have invented them there?" says our friend, proudly pointing to the saws, plows, harrows, and similar apparatus before us. "Ice is an American institution. English ice is full of holes and so soft it melts if you speak loud; and as for the rest of Europe (he pronounces it "Yurrup") it hain't in sight. In Norway I believe they do have some little fair ice; but one New York hotel would use up the whole crop."
He goes on to tell us that New York and Brooklyn alone use in the neighborhood of three million tons a year, and that we export vast quantities to all parts of the world, in ships built especially for the purpose. __By this time the workmen have taken up their positions near the center of the lake, and the cutting begins. We learn that the ice in the middle of lakes and streams is always harder and purer than that near the shore and is stored by itself as a superior grade. Ice produced in the deep waters of Northern New York and Northern New England is all of high grade; that cut in the Kennebec River is the most celebrated.
__The first process in the cutting is the measuring out of a large square very accurately, the lines being deeply incised with an ice plough. Next, the original square is "marked" in smaller squares or, rather, oblongs, of a known size, generally twenty-four by thirty inches."It won't do to work by rule o'thumb," says the foreman. "The cakes have to be packed exactly, with no waste room. Besides, we can tell to a pound what each cake weighs when we take it out."
__The marker is a sort of harrow drawn by a horse, and provided at the back with an upright which serves both as a guide and as a handle upon which a man walking behind bears his weight so as to cause the teeth with which the left side of the marker is set to bite into the ice as it runs. The right side is a thin runner of steel. This runner is set into one of the plowed lines of the square, the horse is started and the machine travels across the field, the teeth cutting a deep furrow parallel with the side of the square.
Another marker, with its runner set in the groove cut by the teeth of the first, follows, making a second groove. When the square has been marked off thus in one direction, the toothed blades are adjusted to a narrower gauge, and a series of grooves are cut at right angles to the first set. Some markers are provided with several sets of saw-teeth, so that two or more grooves are cut at one time. Those shown in the illustration are of the simpler construction.
Now come the plows. They look like a sort of compound agricultural plow. Into a long, heavy beam are set eight separate blades, or shares, each notched at the bottom. Every plow is drawn by a single horse, and guided by ordinary plow-handles. The blades are set in the grooves made by the markers, and the plowing begins. Is it not a curious sight? See how the particles of ice spout up before the rending blades, like fountains of many-hued jewels blown gracefully before the wind. The surface upon which we stand trembles beneath our feet with a dull, continuous, jarring sound.__The whole square has now been plowed into checkers, each space representing a cake. The next stage is "breaking out". Let us go closer to observe the details.
__"Shall we not be in the way?"__"No," responds the foreman, and "No," say the good-natured, smiling faces of these robust fellows. How is it that laboring or living out-of-doors always seems to make human nature more kindly and genial? - I believe better in every way.So we stand near by and watch these men handle their saws, ice-forks, - heavy, long-tined tridents, - ice hooks, and ice-spades. When a single cake has been broken out, the saw-men begin along the plowed lines, the curious, double-handled saw-blades sliding through the solid substance with marvelous rapidity.
When the ice is very thick the whole cake need not be sawed out; the forks and spades applied to the plowed grooves will cleave it away with perfect accuracy.__The ice is cut away in such a fashion that a long, narrow canal of open water is made, connecting with a water-way always kept free to the shore. As fast as the cakes are severed, men with long-handled hooks seize them and float them down the canal. Let us follow one of these cakes upon its journey.
Along the Hudson and on many lakes and streams, the storage houses are built with their feet in the water, so to say; and in such cases the canals float the ice directly beneath the apparatus which hoists the cakes into the houses. But at the place illustrated, Burlington, on Lake Champlain, the storage buildings are at some distance from the lakeside, and the breakwater intervenes, requiring a deal of sliding, teaming, and skidding before the ice reaches its resting-place.
Here is what looks like a sort of half-finished toboggan slide; a rude, slanting framework of heavy timbers up which the cakes are jerked and pushed, in rapid succession, to the crown of the breakwater, then allowed to rush down upon the opposite side, by dint of their own weight, with a whirr and a flash, till they are skillfully checked at the bottom by workmen ready to receive them as they come.
Pause a moment and note the scene before you. In the foreground, the slide, - not a beautiful object, it is true, though as to its usefulness the incessant clash of the descending cakes speaks loudly; at its foot, the workmen, the rude sledges and the heavy teams; beyond, the snow covered expanse; and still beyond, the snow-covered expanse; and still beyond, the ice-houses turning their peaked ends toward us, steamer landings, factories, sheds, long rows of buildings, a stately dwelling or two, a church spire, the faint blue smoke from tall chimneys, all backgrounded upon a hazy horizon of leafless, wintry-looking forest.
__Now let us go on. We cannot go down the slide, unless you are willing to take undignified passage on one of those swiftly coursing blocks of ice; so we must even crawl down the bank as best as we may, putting our scraped shins and bruised flesh down to the general account of the day's experience.
The rough but highly practicable double-runner sledges are drawn up in succession at the foot of the slide, and as the cakes come down, as if with a frenzied intent to shoot, like unchained meteors, into space beyond, they are deftlly caught, and meekly take their places upon the waiting vehicles. One of these sledges has just received its complement, and starts slowly away, drawn by a pair of stout, hog-maned, awkwardly built, white horses, which, like all of the equine race we have seen here, seem to take their toil philosophically, as a necessary, but not intolerable, evil. The driver stands behind his load, and is, apparently, as deliberate, philosophical, and good-natured as his team.
This load, our friend informs us, weighs seven thousand pounds, - three and a half tons; but then, as the foreman says, "sledding is a heap sight easier than wheeling."__The route from the lake to the storage-houses is between dreary-looking sheds and forbidding fences. It is altogether a depressing aspect. Broken blocks of ice, perhaps the evidences of previous disasters to sled-loads, strew the discolored and frozen track.
__Even the shouts and songs of the drivers as they urge their teams along cannot put cheerfulness into the hopelessly uncomfortable scene. It seems to us, bitter as was the cold upon the lake, that as we enter the court-yard before these enormous wooden erections, strengthened with giant timbers and bound with iron bands, where the ice is stored, the cold becomes more searching and merciless from the proximity of these thousands of tons of crystallized water. There are no windows visible, and nothing that you would call a door. The blank walls and shelving roofs have a repellent air.
__Some of these edifices have an amazing capacity. They hold all the way from twenty thousand to sixty thousand tons. Their walls are double, and the space between is filled with saw dust or other non-conducting material. Only a few boards and loose straw is interposed between the ice and the earth, and one layer is superposed immediately upon the other; but in some of the more improved storage-houses along the Hudson, the earth is coated with tanbark, and there is an additional plank sheathing on the wall packed with tan.
__The cakes are unloaded from the sledges upon a staging. Though these glistening oblongs are very heavy, the men with their long hooks whirl them hither and thither as if they were mere straws.__"It ain't the strength," explains the foreman, who still accompanies us, "it's the knowing the how of it. Put Samson himself up there on that staging for the first time, and tell him to spread himself on those cakes, and I'll venture he'd ask for an unlimited vacation after half an hour's work, besides busting half the cakes, barking his own shins, and smashing the toes of everybody around.
Ice has got to be coaxed; you can't drive it. If you set yourself to make it go one way, it'll be surely go the other; and if you use it rough, look out for legs! For it's bound to get square. But just you tickle it up a bit with your hook, kind of advise it to go the way you want, as if you were anxious for its best interests, and, bless you! You can send it spinning twenty yards wit a twist of your little finger. Just look there. See how that cake runs along, as if it knew where it was to go and was ready to oblige."
__This load, our friend informs us, weighs seven thousand pounds, - three and a half tons; but then, as the foreman says, "sledding is a heap sight easier than wheeling."__The route from the lake to the storage-houses is between dreary-looking sheds and forbidding fences. It is altogether a depressing aspect. Broken blocks of ice, perhaps the evidences of previous disasters to sled-loads, strew the discolored and frozen track.
__As the cakes slide across the staging from the sledges, they are gripped, put into a sling, and hoisted by an ordinary pulley tackle drawn by a team. Up go the masses with a creaking and groaning of blocks; the cake is disengaged and disappears within the dark recesses; the horses back and the sling comes down for another load; and so the hoisting and lowering goes on unremittingly all day.
__The Foreman listens with what seems to us an envious air as we tell him that we have seen ice-houses near the metropolis where the ice was drawn up by inclined plane by steam power and conveyed by other planes, ascending or descending, to all portions of the building, with lightning-like rapidity, so that gangs of twenty men, working vigorously, were scarce able to settle the cakes in place so swiftly did they arrive.__"Well," he observes, with a sigh, " we ain't come to that yet up here. But one thing I can tell you: steam h'isting don't make prime ice; no more do patent fixin's. And we've got prime ice, if we do have to store it by hand and horse-power.
New York's a great place, I allow, and it's got nigh about everything, I reckon; but it ain't got the climate to make first-class, A No. 1, gilt edged, no discount ice."__Having thus relieved his feelings he smiles good-naturedly, and, as if fearing he had wounded our local pride, adds:__"New York air about the center of creation, I'm bound to admit. My nephew Jabez Stephens spent a month there once, and ever since he won't wear nothin' but store clothes. He says a visit to New York is a 'liberal education' ; though after all he can't spell for shucks."
We are now in the ice-house itself. What a gloomy place! And what a deathlike chill strikes to the vitals from those frozen mountains on either hand, upon which the feeble rays of the outer day, finding their way in at the door, glint and sparkle with a weird lustre, such as we are told gleams about an arctic "pack."__We are glad to escape into an intermediate space between two buildings, across which runs a bridge-like gutter, along which men are skidding the ice. Propelled by men with hooks, the heavy cakes are sliding in quick succession with a rumbling noise.
__What manner of men are these that labor in shirt sleeves in those regions whose breath is vaporous ice, where, warmly clad as we are, the very flesh seems quivering upon our bones? Yet yonder robust fellow pauses to pass his arm across his perspiring forehead. And here comes another, wet from head to foot and trailing water after him at every step, - a trail which freezes almost as it falls! As he approaches the foreman he shows his white teeth in a broad smile.__"What's come to you, Joshua Smart?" asks our guide. "Ye look a bit damp."__"Yas, some so, boss," replies the newcomer. "Fell into the consarned canal. Got under the ice, too, and mighty nigh about tuckered out afore they pulled me up."
__"Well," says the foreman, "you must be a blamed fool not to know enough to keep out of the drink where ye've made your living since you were a shaver. Go home and get some dry duds on; and look you, Joshua, don't stop to gab on the way, or you might get cold.
__Joshua Smart departed with a loud slapping of sodden trousers; and presently, having seen all there was to see, we heartily thanked the foreman and made our exit in turn, highly gratified with the result of our expedition, but, at the same time, well pleased to return to a rousing fire of New England hickory logs, and a substantial New England supper which was eaten with appetite wholly unsectional, concluding with a plunge into a billowy New England feather bed, and the dreamless slumber which falls to the lot of the just and the tired.
Alvaro Adsit
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Museums Can't Please Everyone, or Can They?
Museums can’t satisfy everyone, but they can seek to serve more of the public than they have in the past. Recently, Claudine Brown, Program Director for Arts and Culture at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, remembered a "Town Meeting" that she attended in Detroit where community members argued over a future plan for a museum that would serve to educate the public about American slavery was especially poignant. Some are ignorant to believe that all African Americans feel the same about how that episode in history should be portrayed, displayed, and conveyed to succeeding generations of all Americans. The presumption is that everyone in a community, in which there is a shared heritage, religion, etc., are on the same page about anything could be seriously damaging to a museum’s public relations.
There is a responsibility on the part of the museum to hear more voices and consider the views and interests of ever greater numbers of the public. One respondent at the "town meeting," according to Brown, wished that her children not be exposed to the graphic portrayal of slavery. Another opposed that view arguing that it was necessary that this part of his heritage be remembered by this and future generations. Both of these public respondents had valid arguments. The two clashed, and their respective views were eventually overshadowed by personal insults. The important thing is that they were given a forum to voice their opinions and were heard by museum planners.
This anecdote made me think about new mediums of communicating in and outside the museum, like Internet blogging. Such mediums might serve the task of reconciling such arguments and others in response to new museums, their missions, and their exhibitions. In fact, blogs promise a more effective public forum for both present and future exhibitions. In such a scenario, a mediator, the museum’s voice in a blog created by the museum itself, can more effectively bring opposing views to a common ground. They can use such a tool to sell their ideas as well as meld them with some of the community’s. The condition of writing one’s response and sending it allows for greater consideration and less impassioned reaction. One can write and revise one’s thoughts before sharing them. What has proven so effective in emailing is true for blogging too.
Of course, blogging can be expensive in that it is a time glutton for paid museum staff, but isn’t this important if the museum is committed to knowing the views of the public and if it is interested in "new audiences"? The respondents to such a blog about an upcoming event or one presently underway will be limited, but it is important that the museum has been responsible for such a public forum. It is important that they have been responsible for a dialogue with their visitors or potential visitors. Such dialogues don’t often happen. This venue has allowed visitors to communicate among themselves about art and history that they feel impassioned enough about to respond to.
Blogs can be used in the actual museum’s exhibition labeling, as I have seen done recently. Such a venue allows the possibility of the museum reconsidering their choices and gaining further insight into the views and interests of their community. We must be reminded that these considerations are the antithesis of the museum in the past when an elite considered their own interests and values and used the museum to impose these on the public en masse. The blog is one more communication tool in a new era which promises a shared forum for those with long-held influence in assuring their imprint on what museums do and can do with those previously alienated and anticipatory of a shared stake in the future message of museums.
References
Brown, Claudine, Program Director, Arts and Culture, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Guest Lecture, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 22 Oct. 2007.
There is a responsibility on the part of the museum to hear more voices and consider the views and interests of ever greater numbers of the public. One respondent at the "town meeting," according to Brown, wished that her children not be exposed to the graphic portrayal of slavery. Another opposed that view arguing that it was necessary that this part of his heritage be remembered by this and future generations. Both of these public respondents had valid arguments. The two clashed, and their respective views were eventually overshadowed by personal insults. The important thing is that they were given a forum to voice their opinions and were heard by museum planners.
This anecdote made me think about new mediums of communicating in and outside the museum, like Internet blogging. Such mediums might serve the task of reconciling such arguments and others in response to new museums, their missions, and their exhibitions. In fact, blogs promise a more effective public forum for both present and future exhibitions. In such a scenario, a mediator, the museum’s voice in a blog created by the museum itself, can more effectively bring opposing views to a common ground. They can use such a tool to sell their ideas as well as meld them with some of the community’s. The condition of writing one’s response and sending it allows for greater consideration and less impassioned reaction. One can write and revise one’s thoughts before sharing them. What has proven so effective in emailing is true for blogging too.
Of course, blogging can be expensive in that it is a time glutton for paid museum staff, but isn’t this important if the museum is committed to knowing the views of the public and if it is interested in "new audiences"? The respondents to such a blog about an upcoming event or one presently underway will be limited, but it is important that the museum has been responsible for such a public forum. It is important that they have been responsible for a dialogue with their visitors or potential visitors. Such dialogues don’t often happen. This venue has allowed visitors to communicate among themselves about art and history that they feel impassioned enough about to respond to.
Blogs can be used in the actual museum’s exhibition labeling, as I have seen done recently. Such a venue allows the possibility of the museum reconsidering their choices and gaining further insight into the views and interests of their community. We must be reminded that these considerations are the antithesis of the museum in the past when an elite considered their own interests and values and used the museum to impose these on the public en masse. The blog is one more communication tool in a new era which promises a shared forum for those with long-held influence in assuring their imprint on what museums do and can do with those previously alienated and anticipatory of a shared stake in the future message of museums.
References
Brown, Claudine, Program Director, Arts and Culture, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Guest Lecture, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 22 Oct. 2007.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
A Modest Proposal for Educational Outreach and Programming at The Curran Homestead
The following was presented before the Board of Directors of The Curran Homestead in September, 2008 by Robert Schmick.
A Proposal
The most important initial step for any such proposals is to develop a website for The Curran Homestead that exemplifies an active and vigorous attempt at developing further educational programming. The new website should be linked to popular sites related to Maine museums and other institutions. There are ways to move such a website towards the top of search lists related to Maine life, rural life, small museums, living history museums, etc. on search engines like Google, and these should be sought out. Such a website could be a vehicle for initiating more effectively the proposed programming below and all other proposals for educational outreach.
This website would not only include digital images characterizing the farm site and its offerings but a text of its mission, future, and currently evolving educational outreach. It would be a resource that would be invaluable to the process of soliciting interest in programming by the public and school districts (teachers, administrators). Such a site would also serve as a ready reference to grant providers and potential donors. So much can be said for having the ability to say “Visit our website.”
Since there are relatively few museum websites that provide resources like lesson plans that link standards and curriculum with their collections for teachers, serving in “teaching across the humanities,” there is a perfect opportunity for The Curran Homestead to become a vibrant and useful resource for an area where there are relatively few history museums competing for visitors (DiSalvo 2007). Providing lesson plans that connect specifically to the museum’s material culture would be a way “to increase” their “impact” on the community and draw more teachers and students to both website and physical site. These resources could be made as printable documents on the website. Certainly with rising fuel costs, school field trips are becoming harder to justify. This reality and the added work of linking the specifics of the Curran Homestead to a teacher’s curriculum make a trip to the site an increasingly harder sell to both administrators and teachers alike. Creating some finely tailored resources online that would be attractive and pertinent to standards would serve as a hook to get schools to the physical site and also serve frequently as an alternative when coming to the site is cost prohibitive. Such resources could be easily created with little or no cost.
The website could also serve as a meeting place for those who wish to share their rural Maine experiences both past and present. The Curran family has a website that documents their history and briefly their connection with the Homestead. The Homestead, both the physical one and the website, could more immediately and effectively become the “Homestead” of other Mainers and others with similar rural connections. A website could become a type of scrapbook of stories and images about Maine rural life evolving into a digital component of the museums “collections.” The numerous photos taken in the past at gatherings at the site, and that have filled the pages of past printed newsletters, should be archived on the website, for they too add to the museum’s evolving narrative. Such a “collection” that would evolve through contribution and interaction from the public could further add to the resources from which educational programming is developed. There have been a number of small museums similar to The Curran Homestead that consist mainly of historical structures but lacks unique material culture, like photos of known people in rural Maine, known settings in rural Maine, and the agricultural material culture it does have in use. A partnership with a local institution does have such images within its holdings might be something to pursue. What makes a museum a museum and its “artifacts” worthy of museum status is that they are effectively attached to a narrative. Building a collection of photographs related to the current collection and mission has been the response and success of other museums like The Curran Homestead.
This focus on building a collection of donated digital reproductions of vintage photographs from the public allows would serve The Curran Homestead effectively. These digital images would not require the tedious and often expensive preservation and care of original photographs. Such a scheme would embrace many new participants/patrons instead of merely traditional wealthy donors and the precious objects they alone can afford to donate. Their donated images could assist in the telling of an American story that is inclusive of all of the US rather than only a small community in Maine. Such digital images would further assist the museum’s use of existing material culture now present onsite to more effectively reach a greater number of educators and tell better stories for educational purposes.
Making that connection with the story of rural life beyond Penobscot or Hancock counties too, or even Maine itself, may serve in The Curran Homestead’s efforts to find funding in places never considered before. The population of Maine rural communities is becoming increasingly diversified; making them included in The Curran Homestead story would be important to its continued relevancy. Such an element could be a part of the museum’s website and be a part of rebranding efforts. For as The Curran Homestead is poised to develop a greater level of volunteerism, capital development, fund raising, educational programming etc., it would need to realize strategies that will serve multiple purposes like the above scheme, and it will constantly need to consider its own relevancy to the communities it intends to serve.
With greater concern for the limitations of our current energy sources and the subsequent cost rises effecting such essentials as heating and food in the US, Mainers may be especially receptive to revisiting traditions of the past that seek out the essentials of living more independently of global markets and embracing greater self sufficiency. Such points might be key elements to marketing strategies, and rebranding, as well as educational programming that would serve to generate revenues for the museum. Many domestic traditions like canning fruits and vegetables, sewing, knitting, crocheting, soap making, gardening, animal husbandry, and the like once characterized rural life in Maine, but the knowledge and skills required for these have largely slipped from the contemporary lives of most. Creating a program of short courses that promise to reintroduce and nurture such skills and pastimes among contemporary Mainers may be appropriate to the educational outreach of The Curran Homestead and serve to generate added revenues. Such offerings of “experiential education,” or “learning by doing,” is more appropriate than the more common alternative of lecture, gallery talk, and guided tour which are fundamentally flawed pedagogically for kids on a trip to a museum for the first time or the tenth time (http://www.history.org).
For a nominal fee, area residents would be offered seasonal programming at the museum’s campus or nearby meeting place. Area experts would be sought out for the purpose of instruction. An incentive for these proposed future instructors could be, if needs be, an agreement to share the collected tuitions from the student participants with them, profit sharing.
Adult After-School and Weekend Programming
Instructors would have to be sought out, interviewed, reviewed, and contracted to carry out such an endeavor. There would also have to be recruitment and training of volunteers who could be called upon to carry out such tasks as setting up, preparing materials for courses, setting up instruction areas on a weekly basis, and assisting instructors, if necessary. There are a number of institutions that might assist in developing the human resources for such an endeavor. The University of Maine has its own museum with an historical and agricultural theme, and students run it. Perhaps students could be sought out for such an endeavor, if there is an interest among them. Museum Studies programs could be solicited for summer interns. Local schools often require community service for graduation; students might be recruited for a time interval. Boy Scouts and youth groups are potentially seeking opportunities for volunteerism that would provide leadership experiences. Grants could include funds for staffing some educational programming.
Where could all this programming take place? As a 501(c)(3) non-profit it would be prudent to have some or all of the programming to take place onsite; this would also serve in building public exposure to this institution and its offerings. That is the point after all of a living history museum, life onsite. There are a number of out buildings that could be used for such purposes in warm weather. The Curran Homestead has repeatedly used tents and canopies for “gatherings,” and these are a good way to achieve shelter for such programming in warm weather. The main house and gift shop building are possible sites for inclement weather and colder seasons. The possibility is there for year round programming, and that practice would further The Homestead’s role as an ongoing and permanent educational resource in the community rather than an occasional place of functions. Areas within the farmhouse that presently serve as historical tableau might serve greater purpose as areas for active and participatory educational programming.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) provides funding for educational programming for museums, and there have been a number of institutions similar to The Homestead that have found funding for making their collections of material culture effective tools for learning about the arts. The NEA’s Learning in the Arts For Children and Youth Grants should be of particular interest. Given that there is currently no arts programming linked to The Homestead’s material culture, a decision would need to be made to broaden the focus of the museum to include “creativity and education in the arts” as part of its educational mission. This would not in any way effect the current mission but simply create new ways of appreciating and utilizing the facilities and collections for educational purposes. Such a grant, with its emphasis on “children and youth acquiring knowledge and understanding of and skills in the arts,” could fit nicely with the museum’s current collection and the educational needs of the community. The museum’s offering of potential “hands-on” learning experiences centered around rural, agricultural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers a potentially good match to this grant’s goal of “participatory learning” for community-based learning, outside the “regular school day.” There is a potential for creating weekly after-school programs with the existing material culture onsite.
This “learning” could be accomplished not only through after-school programming but “summer arts education” as well. Such summer programming could similarly focus on school-age children acquiring new “knowledge and skills” as well as gaining a lifelong interest in not only arts and culture but local community, history, and livelihoods, which is directly linked to Maine standards for fourth graders. The Homestead would have to staff the site with “skilled artists” and “teachers” from the area to make such a program possible. The museum’s own collection of tools, farming implements, buildings, landscape ( including specimens of flora and fauna), domestic appliances, furnishings, and, potentially, the development of recorded, print and audio, narratives associated with them and their origins could all be subject to arts programming. Such programming could be a significant source of earned income for the museum as well as serve to humanize it in the eyes of its constituents.
There are a number of other grants that are available for further development of educational outreach to particularly pre-school children, and these would be worth further research by the museum. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (ILMS), specifically, its National Leadership Grants, provide funding for the development and implementation of educational programming with “engaging activities to help develop the skills needed to reach [school] readiness as well as for an “after school arts and a homework assistance center” that “supports mothers and children through learning and play” in recent years. Such a project would be applicable to both the needs of current and potential future visitors. Such grants emphasize “welcoming and supporting activities for parents to participate with their children as families” (ILMS).
The fact that The Homestead is located near the Fields Pond Audubon Center is especially fortuitous, for it could allow for partnership programming which would justify parents and caregivers traveling out to The Homestead on a weekday or weekend for something more than one purpose and for more than one hour or two for a specific program at The Homestead. Both institutions could simply seek to have their unique programs scheduled so that the public could participant in both; this would appeal to those concerned with conserving fuel expenses and limited time. Certainly, proximity to this well established institution warrants nurturing the potential residual effects of its student and family visitation.
Networking the stories The Homestead tells and the experiences it provides in order to have greater impact and relevancy to its visitors’ experience might be realized by creating programming that specifically complements the themes of nature and environment so important to the Fields Pond experience. This type of networking would provide greater impact and relevancy to its visitors’ experience. It could be the “hook” to get Fields Pond visitors down the road to The Homestead too, and “once you get them in then you can get them back” says Carl Nold, President and CEO of Historic New England and Chairperson of the American Association of Museums.
The fact that one of the 2003 recipients of ILMS Learning Opportunity Grants was the similarly small institution the Essex County Historical Society, in upstate New York, evidences that there is a possibility for funding similar projects at The Curran Homestead with large federal funding institutions. Such a proposal would likely seek funds for a “permanent presence in local schools expanding educational services.” It could also seek to create a “presence on [its] museum website,” which could begin before the protracted and required application process with proactive steps to incorporate educational resources in the website content. The tuition for public participation in such programming could, like the Essex County, NY grant recipient, could be sought through subsidization for targeted low-income families in Penobscot and Hancock counties. Ronald McDonald House Charities is yet another organization that provides grant money “for sponsored membership and free admissions for low income families, and this is worth consideration once educational programming has been organized; the Maine Discovery Museum has been a recent beneficiary of this funding (2007). The “application and review process” for such grants is often time consuming, taking from eight to eighteen months in the case of ILMS grants. Having a comprehensive educational plan with some programming in place and ongoing would be necessary before beginning the application process for grants promising tuition subsidization.
One of the most important considerations in planning marketing and development for an institution like The Curran Homestead is continually broadening its audience. A website would serve in targeting new people. A potentially receptive audience is the parents of sixth graders and under, and the children themselves. The museum has served an audience of children and their parents, relatives, guardians, friends, and caregivers; there could be an increased emphasis on children and those who accompany them. Programming should provide greater emphasis on an experience for children. Family and community based learning experiences should be further emphasized. Such a circumstance might be a focus of marketing as the museum continues to seek new audiences. Knowing who parents are should be a focus of current marketing concerns, for these will ultimately affect the pursuit of grants for educational programming. New families are migrating to Maine. Gen-Xers are a significant part of this demographic, and these may be a group that the museum specifically focuses on in the future.
Educational programming can be an integral part of a museum’s earned income revenues (Genoways 155). The museum could be marketed specifically to parents seeking programming for their pre-school children during both the work week and weekend. “At home” mothers and fathers are always seeking new daytime activities, and there are only so many story hours, swimming lessons at the “Y,” and playtimes scheduled within a community the size of Orrington and its environs. Advertizing scheduled weekly offerings of story and/or activity hours that connect thematically with Maine traditions, heritage, landscape, and agriculture could be a draw for this audience. Revenues would come by way of subscription to such activities whereby a seasonal or monthly bargain fee could be charged for each child or family participating. A membership card to this activity could identify subscribers. Paying per visit would be a more expensive alternative. Such programming for especially children of pre-school age is never sufficient in any community.
A marketing campaign specifically devoted to recognizing the needs of twenty and thirty something parents would serve the causes of increased participation and visitation. Gen-Xers (1965-1981) are the parents of “three fourths of [all] elementary school children” in the US, says James Chung, president of Reach Advisors, a Massachusetts-based marketing firm and specialist on the generation ( Gardiner 2006). Knowing them would help to bring greater numbers to The Curran Homestead fold.
Gen-Xers are a “different breed” than their baby boomer predecessors, for they are more likely to move for college or career, “marry later,” “have children later,” and “likely to find themselves distant from family support networks,” and more likely to take time off” for the sake of their kids ( Johnston and Chung). Fathers are especially unlike the generation before with their “paternity leaves,” rejection of “overtime,” and rushing home to spend time with their kids (Wen 2005). They are a generation that characteristically likes “getting involved and meeting new people,” yet are “not living up to the giving patterns to non-profit institutions like their parents may have been.
Given these factors, it might be prudent for The Curran Homestead to direct some marketing towards the specific characteristics of this parent group. Focusing on this group’s participation through “volunteerism” has been seen as a means to compensate for the widening gap in this group’s negligible giving habits, and this is being seen in New York State’s capitol region where one Gen-X volunteer, among a growing number, claims “volunteering gives him a sense of gratification and credibility in an uncertain world” ( Gardiner 2006). The museum should emphasize a role whereby it serves as a conduit for interaction between community members thereby targeting specifically this group’s characteristic disconnect with community. A strategy might call attention to the fact that The Curran Homestead brings parents with similar experiences and lifestyles together as well as people of all ages. Greater understanding of this by the museum might serve to turn specifically Gen-Xers on to giving to this newer institution when they as a demographic are more characteristically “turned-off by the cultures and images associated with long standing charities” ( Panepento 2005). Inviting individuals to the site for more frequent social gathering is a means to insure greater volunteerism.
The Curran Homestead has the potential to be more effectively touted as a vehicle for community building through the development of greater educational programming. A relationship with area schools will be an important step, but overtures should be made to day-care providers and pre-schools too. Weekday (i.e. after-school, field trips) and weekend programming on and offsite could be developed. The museum could assist individuals or groups in satisfying increasingly demanding curriculums; for example, resources can be provided for Grades, 1, 3, 4, and 6 that include a study of family, societies, and communities in Maine. Maine history, commerce, and livelihoods embody The Curran Homestead experience, and, therefore, it is perfectly suitable for assisting teachers in satisfying state standards and aligning itself with Maine State Learning Results. Core curriculums like social studies, in addition to English language arts and the visual arts, would be targeted through programming that focuses on the use of the museum’s material culture for purposes of discussion, writing, reading, story telling, and the use of a variety of art media, among others.
In conclusion, The Curran Homestead would be well served by a vigorous campaign to interest area childcare centers and schools that specifically serve pre and elementary school children in educational programming. Programming that focuses on arts and humanities making use of not only onsite material culture but digital representations, i.e. photographs of it, online though the museum’s website. This programming would focus on state standards in a variety of disciplines. Grants, offered by the ILMS, NEA, and others (The Maine State Archives), that promote inclusion of low-income audiences, community-based learning, arts education, school readiness, after-school, and summer programming should be actively pursued after initial steps are made to create a comprehensive education plan for the museum and its website.
Proposed Adult and Youth Courses and Programming for After-School, Fun Saturdays, and Summer
Rural Maine Life and Its Global Connection: There are many possibilities for partnerships with local institutions for funding and programming. There are also possibilities for partnerships with distant institutions. The World Awareness Children’s Museum (WACM) in Glens Falls, New York maintains an ongoing cultural exchange program and partnership with schools in the US and abroad. Part of their mission includes collecting youth art that is thematically linked to a student’s culture. Through an arrangement with teachers, art is created that characterizes the lives of schoolchildren which is subsequently exchanged with artwork similarly created by another class in another part of the world. The point is that schoolchildren can communicate through visual art with a global community about their cultural identity. Greater understandings about each other evolve without the stumbling blocks of verbal communication.
The WACM has always been successful with acquiring art produced from abroad but getting American teachers to participate has often been a challenge. Given the mission of The Curran Homestead, a program that allows for a conversation about the unique characteristics of Maine rural life and its traditions with school children could evolve through a program which allows a museum educator to visit area schools and facilitate art making centered around this theme. The art produced could be merchandized and used for traveling exhibitions (displays at local and statewide businesses). The art work could be exchanged with classrooms abroad, and such a conversation about others like us in other lands can evolve with the public through a variety of methods of presentation. Overtures could be made to WACM to develop a joint project and joint application for funding.
Saturday Games
This would provide a venue for parents and their kids to play games together rather than stay at home and watch TV or play video games. Tents with tables could be the environment for good old fashioned board game playing and the like. Musicians could be invited to practice as accompaniment to the play or old records could be amplified through a PA system. The point would be that the Curran Homestead becomes associated with fun for families and as a place for the community to come together and interact. Games provided. Admission fee for parents and children necessitated.
Square Dance ( “Ho-Down Saturdays at the Curran Homestead”)
What happened to community dances (Block-dances, “Ho-down” in the barn)? This could be the theme for an adult fundraising event as well as an after school/Saturday program in which traditional folk dance and music is revisited and practiced in a fun learning experience.
An annual summer dance (the making of a new tradition) could become a fundraising event. Wooden flooring could be rented and set up on the lawn with tenting for inclement weather. Participants might be required to show up in period dress that connects with The Homestead’s origin with their ticket in hand. Live entertainment and food could be elements of such a fundraiser. Local media would be invited for public relations, and staff could solicit membership for The Curran Homestead, including among seasonal residents.
Say “Goat Cheese”
Goats require little land and are suitable to rocky terrains characteristic of Maine. How does one go about raising them, and how do you go about making cheese from its milk. Learn these basics. Make cheese.
Blacksmithing
A challenging offering, for it may be that such skills are maintained and regulated by the State of Maine? Leonard’s Mill offers a summer workshop in blacksmithing. Such skills were often a reality of the small family farm when larger blacksmithing establishments were not available. If possible, a portable and temporary work area might be set-up onsite for a weekend course. Such an offering would depend on the feasibility of being able to set-up such tools and work area in a reasonably short amount of time. The participants would learn the essentials of fire-making, bellowing, simple iron heating and bending, shaping. This may evolve into larger projects. Given that acetylene torches were available in the late 19th century, a course in simple welding and brazing could also be offered, and would undoubtedly be a popular offering. Safety would be a concern, and insurance issues might be quelled with the requirement that participants provide evidence that they are insured if injured. There are supplementary insurance plans that would cover a participant for such an educational endeavor, and these would be solely the participant’s responsibility. Such measures are taken by many area schools that are no longer responsible for carrying injury insurance for students. A form is sent home with students, and parents are required to provide insurance information and a signature affirming their knowledge of the insurance coverage policies. This would all be disclosed in the course application and literature.
Knitting: Students would learn the essentials of materials and tools. Participants will complete a project using a variety of techniques offered in class. Materials for completing or participating in this course could be offered in the gift shop for a nominal fee. A materials fee could be included in the tuition.
Crocheting
Quilting
Rug Hooking
Looming
With a large number of local weavers who produce fabrics etc., it might be easy to find people to spread the knowledge of weaving to a group of eager participants using a variety of locally produced raw materials like wool, alpaca fiber, and goat hair. Materials provided in the gift shop. Looms? Could include one instruction loom whereby participants are introduced to the essentials in limited classes with a limited number of participants.
Caning Chairs
Learning the essentials of materials and tools. Students could re-cane donated chairs. These would become part of The Curran Homesteads furnishings or they could bring in their own personal objects for refurbishment. Materials could be sold at the gift shop. Traditional materials like dried cattails might be had onsite and prepared as a Boy Scout project, students seeking community service projects for graduation, or through volunteers (docents).
Basket Making : A partnership might be formed with the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor for such an endeavor as could other course proposals be realized through some type of partnership allowing for shared responsibilities with local museums like the Maine Maritime Museum. Materials for such an offering could be had from onsite resources. This would be in keeping with the Curran Homestead’s mission of being a living history museum that also seeks to recreate the various industries that were once realized by small Maine farms.
Foraging : Identifying edibles in the wild. There are many interested in what there is for the finding, preparing, and consuming in the Maine wild. Parsnips, mushrooms, berries, greens, and the like are just some of the edible treasures. There are many with the expertise to show us what there is free for the taking. Caution observed.
Home Entertainment 1900 Style
Offer an alternative to our contemporary lives with a program that re-introduces the card games, board games, puppets, playmaking, and music of ancestors. Participants might include separate groups of specific age.
Fly Fishin’
How many of us are curious about the art of fly casting and fly making? Amateur experts share their knowledge. Participants learn the fundamentals.
Parlor Music Circa 1905
Participants will gather around the collections vintage Victrola and listen to music from the area. Eats and social interaction emphasized, and possibly dancing. Music enthusiasts can share their own records with the group and their stories, and this would obviously not focus exclusively on 1905 and thereabouts but from multiple generations of music appreciation through 78s, 45s, and 33rpm records exclusively. These gatherings, and the stories revealed about music tastes, might contribute to the museum’s oral history collection.
Jug Band Workshop
Participants will construct a stringed washtub Bass, tambourines from household items, and other music makers. Jugs and washboards provided. Participants will learn simple skills in composition and performance using instruments found or constructed. Lemonade served. Kids K-5, Teen Group, Adults.
Banjo Lesson Saturdays
Participants supply their own bangos. Accomplished bangos share appreciation for and the basics of banjo music. With this type of arrangement the museum could offer a profit sharing arrangement with instructors.
Naïve Portraiture
Even after photography was invented itinerant painters crossed the countryside with wood panels and brushes creating likenesses for a fee. Participants will learn the rudiments of oil painting.
Photography Circa 1909
Participants experience the ubiquitous box camera of the past through their own construction of a pinhole camera with found materials. They take pictures and share them.
Stamp Collecting
Especially with the long winters, and before TV and videos took their time away, Maine kids collected things like stamps. In the 1890s throughout the first half of the twentieth century kids spent much time with their collections, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the more famous amateur philatelists. This hobby is not just about finding stamps and sticking them in an album. There is knowledge about condition and the variety of types that is known be fewer. Stamp experts will impart this knowledge to them. Kids can trade and share their collections with each other in this Saturday venue. Stamp collecting supplies, which are sometimes hard to find today, could be had in the gift shop. Old timers could share their collections and the stories that go with them ( oral history ). Display ( compliments of the Curran Homestead) could be set up at local businesses or institutions like banks for further PR.
The Curran Homestead Gift Shop could offer for sale materials related to course offerings.
Maine State Archives Grants
This institution is still in the midst of making its offerings available for this year; these grants are solely dependent on the State’s budget. It is anticipated that there will be an opportunity to create an educational partnership with area schools through such an award. The following could be funded by a number of grants both State and Federal.
With each day unfortunately many with valuable skills and stories from the past to share are lost. A program of documenting Maine’s past on audio cassette/digital storage could assist in preserving and utilizing a potentially rich resource for learning about Maine identity for students now and in the future. Some possible themes that would be worthy of seeking out and collecting as oral histories might include:
The Curran Homestead
Who were the Currans? Interview contemporary Currans and their memories of the family homestead. What was here that isn’t here now?
The Curran Homestead Restoration and Refurbishment
Have volunteers from the past fifteen years tell the story of what the Curran Homestead looked like at the beginning of its museum status and how its present condition was achieved.
This week I spoke with Irv Marsters , and he informed me that oral histories focusing on The Curran Homestead were done five or six years by UMO , but that no one had ever listened to the final project. These involved members of the Curran family. Tracking these down and getting copies would be a first step in planning out such a project. These oral histories could become part of The Curran Homestead’s website.
Tools & Materials
Explores the relationship between occupations and the tools and materials by which they were realized (logging, maple sugaring, farming, fishing etc.)
Native American Life
Hunting and Fishing
Building My Home
Entertainment
Downeast Maine
What is it that is unique about this region of the US? Participants would be made aware of some the unique traditions of this area and their origin.
Immigration (4th and 5th grade)
Who were these people? Who are these people?
What did they contribute to farming in Maine in the past and in the present?
Why did they come, and what attracts them today?
What traditions did/do they bring with them?
The Curran Homestead could create a scripted framework by which storytellers are introduced. This would more obviously connect these individual’s stories to The Curran Homestead and its specific history. A multimedia presentation could be part of this. Students would seek out their own oral histories to add to the collection making contact with family friends, relatives, or acquaintances with worthy experiences to share and be recorded. Students would propose to interview each interviewee to their teachers and these would require an approval by the teacher and a formal permission slip signed by interviewees granting permission to the State and The Curran Homestead to use the recording for educational purposes. This would insure that there would a standard of potential usefulness/pertinence for all the histories collected. In sum, Museum educators from The Curran Homestead would model the process by which interviews are given by students. Students would learn by experience an interview in class in which they also participate assisting in a Q & A with the guest storyteller in an initial visit to their classroom. Follow-up visits would also be part of this programming, and students would offer their progress for discussion. Ultimately, all participating students would make a visit to The Curran Homestead itself. The initial visit and oral history orchestrated by museum educators from The Curran Homestead would be recorded and would contribute to the collection of oral histories. Students would learn by seeing and doing. Teachers would contribute in nurturing the skills of interviewing, reviewing the results, and follow-ups about these individual storytellers connection to Maine identity. These would be further reinforced by subsequent follow-ups by the museum educator.
Developing a program of using oral histories to satisfy ELA and social studies standards would be at the forefront of current pedagogy with its emphasis on collecting and using primary source information for the purposes of critical thinking and understanding about the past and present. Student participants would be subject to such learning experiences as story telling and acquire such skills as first hand information gathering through interviewing and note-taking, among others. There would also be an element of public speaking because students would be acting as interviewers in these recording that would become a public resource. Students would share their experiences with this project. The Curran Homestead would provide guest storytellers who could offer informal narratives that in some way relate thematically to the material culture of the museum itself. The grant would provide funding for cassette recorders ( or digital recorders) and educators for the implementation of such a program.
The program would create a collection of oral histories that would insure the preservation of some of Maine’s past while also further contributing to The Curran Homestead’s evolving identity as an educational resource for Maine citizens and schools receptive to cooperative educational programming with the museum. Such a project could be used for public relations purposes, for such a project would be of interest to the local, state, and national media. The oral histories collected would become part of the Maine State Archives collection. Participating schools and The Curran Homestead would also preserve copies for their continued use.
Creating a website with audio offerings might be key to creating a resource for area teachers and others. No building would be needed to house audio cassette or digital recordings. All the recordings could be housed in cyberspace making them always available and requiring no staff to physically locate them. Of course, a webmaster would be essential for managing these files. This means of storage and delivery of “new collections” could be had relatively cheaply. Podcasting has become increasingly popular with not only techies but more general consumers. The software for downloading and editing digital audio are free with MacIntosh systems; GarageBand software is really a great product for downloading your digital audio files and producing quality recordings for sharing on the Internet. PC users can find the free download for Audacity software online, and this more primitive editing software can be utilized at no cost. The cost for making the proposed collection of oral histories available online would only entail having a large storage capacity for continual additions to the site as well as someone to manage these. Volunteers could be trained to manage these files.
Funding for such a project might be had through current grants like the National Archives and Records Administration’s Basic Projects grants, specifically, the Electronic Records Project. This supports projects that will lead to sustainable electronic records archives that preserve digital records with enduring historical value. The ILMS and the National Endowment for the Humanities provides funding for Digital Partnerships with their Advancing Knowledge Grants that might assist The Curran Homestead in such a project. Making a decision to take the first steps towards consultation with these funding institutions may be the first step in deciding the feasibility of realizing such a project.
References
DiSalvo, B.J., and A. Franzen-Sheehan. “Expanding Art Museums into Humanities Classrooms: Research on Online Curricula for Cross-Disciplinary Study.” J.Trant and D. Bearman. Eds., Museums and the Wb 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, March 31, 2007, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/diSalvo/diSalvo.html (accessed August 5, 2008).
Gardiner, Bob. “The ‘Me’ Generation Gives Back.” Albany Times Union, September 24, 2006, http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=518854&category=BUSINESS&newsdate=9/24/2006 (accessed December 2, 2007).
Genoways, Hugh H., and Lynn M. Ireland. Museum Administration; An Introduction. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003.
Institute of Museum and Library Services, http://www.imls.gov/results.asp?state=0&city=7description=on&inst=&keyword=&program=gt_1010&sort=year&year=8 ( accessed September 9, 2008)
Johnstone, Sally, and James Chung. “Moms Wanna Rock Too,” Ski Area Management, Vol.46-2, Page 44, http://www.saminfo.com/issues/article.php?tid=3545
Maine Discovery Museum, Bangor, Maine, Newsletter, December, 2007.
National Endowment for the Arts. “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth Grants,” http://www.nea.gov.grants/apply/GAP08/LITA.html (accessed September 5, 2008)
National Endowment for the Humanities. “Advancing Knowledge: The ILMS/NEH Digital Partnership.” http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelenes/Digital_Partnership.html (accessed September 5, 2008).
NARA ( National Archives and Records Administration). The National Historical Publication and Records (NHPRC), “Grant Announcement: Electronic Records Projects.” http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement/electronic.html (accessed September 10, 2008)
Nold, Carl. President and CEO, Historic New England and Chairperson , AAM, Lecture, Tufts University, Museum Studies Program, Medford, Massachusetts, December 10, 2007.
Panepeto, Peter, “Connecting with Generation X; Charities Look For New Ways to Reach Out to the Under 40 Set,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy/Fund Raising (March 31, 2005), http://www.philanthropy.com/free/articles/v17/i12/12003301.htm (accessed December 2, 2007).
Peacock, D., and J.Brownbill, “Audiences, Visitors, Users: Reconceptualizing Users of Museum Online Content and Services,” J.Trant and D.Bearman, Eds., Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics ( March 31, 2007).
Richardson, Jim, “Rebranding,” Museum Marketing Blog, (September 16, 2007), http://www.museumbrandingblog.co.uk/?cat=3 (accessed September 1, 2008).
Schwartz, Nancy. “Shape Your Nonprofit Website to Generate the Actions You Need.” (May 25, 2007) http://www.nancyschwartz.comeffectivenonprofitwebsites.html/ (accessed December 7, 2007).
Viera, Diane L. “Strike Up the Brand: Creating or Enhancing Your Museum’s Brand Identity, American association for the State and Local History Technical Leaflet 232, 2005.
A Proposal
The most important initial step for any such proposals is to develop a website for The Curran Homestead that exemplifies an active and vigorous attempt at developing further educational programming. The new website should be linked to popular sites related to Maine museums and other institutions. There are ways to move such a website towards the top of search lists related to Maine life, rural life, small museums, living history museums, etc. on search engines like Google, and these should be sought out. Such a website could be a vehicle for initiating more effectively the proposed programming below and all other proposals for educational outreach.
This website would not only include digital images characterizing the farm site and its offerings but a text of its mission, future, and currently evolving educational outreach. It would be a resource that would be invaluable to the process of soliciting interest in programming by the public and school districts (teachers, administrators). Such a site would also serve as a ready reference to grant providers and potential donors. So much can be said for having the ability to say “Visit our website.”
Since there are relatively few museum websites that provide resources like lesson plans that link standards and curriculum with their collections for teachers, serving in “teaching across the humanities,” there is a perfect opportunity for The Curran Homestead to become a vibrant and useful resource for an area where there are relatively few history museums competing for visitors (DiSalvo 2007). Providing lesson plans that connect specifically to the museum’s material culture would be a way “to increase” their “impact” on the community and draw more teachers and students to both website and physical site. These resources could be made as printable documents on the website. Certainly with rising fuel costs, school field trips are becoming harder to justify. This reality and the added work of linking the specifics of the Curran Homestead to a teacher’s curriculum make a trip to the site an increasingly harder sell to both administrators and teachers alike. Creating some finely tailored resources online that would be attractive and pertinent to standards would serve as a hook to get schools to the physical site and also serve frequently as an alternative when coming to the site is cost prohibitive. Such resources could be easily created with little or no cost.
The website could also serve as a meeting place for those who wish to share their rural Maine experiences both past and present. The Curran family has a website that documents their history and briefly their connection with the Homestead. The Homestead, both the physical one and the website, could more immediately and effectively become the “Homestead” of other Mainers and others with similar rural connections. A website could become a type of scrapbook of stories and images about Maine rural life evolving into a digital component of the museums “collections.” The numerous photos taken in the past at gatherings at the site, and that have filled the pages of past printed newsletters, should be archived on the website, for they too add to the museum’s evolving narrative. Such a “collection” that would evolve through contribution and interaction from the public could further add to the resources from which educational programming is developed. There have been a number of small museums similar to The Curran Homestead that consist mainly of historical structures but lacks unique material culture, like photos of known people in rural Maine, known settings in rural Maine, and the agricultural material culture it does have in use. A partnership with a local institution does have such images within its holdings might be something to pursue. What makes a museum a museum and its “artifacts” worthy of museum status is that they are effectively attached to a narrative. Building a collection of photographs related to the current collection and mission has been the response and success of other museums like The Curran Homestead.
This focus on building a collection of donated digital reproductions of vintage photographs from the public allows would serve The Curran Homestead effectively. These digital images would not require the tedious and often expensive preservation and care of original photographs. Such a scheme would embrace many new participants/patrons instead of merely traditional wealthy donors and the precious objects they alone can afford to donate. Their donated images could assist in the telling of an American story that is inclusive of all of the US rather than only a small community in Maine. Such digital images would further assist the museum’s use of existing material culture now present onsite to more effectively reach a greater number of educators and tell better stories for educational purposes.
Making that connection with the story of rural life beyond Penobscot or Hancock counties too, or even Maine itself, may serve in The Curran Homestead’s efforts to find funding in places never considered before. The population of Maine rural communities is becoming increasingly diversified; making them included in The Curran Homestead story would be important to its continued relevancy. Such an element could be a part of the museum’s website and be a part of rebranding efforts. For as The Curran Homestead is poised to develop a greater level of volunteerism, capital development, fund raising, educational programming etc., it would need to realize strategies that will serve multiple purposes like the above scheme, and it will constantly need to consider its own relevancy to the communities it intends to serve.
With greater concern for the limitations of our current energy sources and the subsequent cost rises effecting such essentials as heating and food in the US, Mainers may be especially receptive to revisiting traditions of the past that seek out the essentials of living more independently of global markets and embracing greater self sufficiency. Such points might be key elements to marketing strategies, and rebranding, as well as educational programming that would serve to generate revenues for the museum. Many domestic traditions like canning fruits and vegetables, sewing, knitting, crocheting, soap making, gardening, animal husbandry, and the like once characterized rural life in Maine, but the knowledge and skills required for these have largely slipped from the contemporary lives of most. Creating a program of short courses that promise to reintroduce and nurture such skills and pastimes among contemporary Mainers may be appropriate to the educational outreach of The Curran Homestead and serve to generate added revenues. Such offerings of “experiential education,” or “learning by doing,” is more appropriate than the more common alternative of lecture, gallery talk, and guided tour which are fundamentally flawed pedagogically for kids on a trip to a museum for the first time or the tenth time (http://www.history.org).
For a nominal fee, area residents would be offered seasonal programming at the museum’s campus or nearby meeting place. Area experts would be sought out for the purpose of instruction. An incentive for these proposed future instructors could be, if needs be, an agreement to share the collected tuitions from the student participants with them, profit sharing.
Adult After-School and Weekend Programming
Instructors would have to be sought out, interviewed, reviewed, and contracted to carry out such an endeavor. There would also have to be recruitment and training of volunteers who could be called upon to carry out such tasks as setting up, preparing materials for courses, setting up instruction areas on a weekly basis, and assisting instructors, if necessary. There are a number of institutions that might assist in developing the human resources for such an endeavor. The University of Maine has its own museum with an historical and agricultural theme, and students run it. Perhaps students could be sought out for such an endeavor, if there is an interest among them. Museum Studies programs could be solicited for summer interns. Local schools often require community service for graduation; students might be recruited for a time interval. Boy Scouts and youth groups are potentially seeking opportunities for volunteerism that would provide leadership experiences. Grants could include funds for staffing some educational programming.
Where could all this programming take place? As a 501(c)(3) non-profit it would be prudent to have some or all of the programming to take place onsite; this would also serve in building public exposure to this institution and its offerings. That is the point after all of a living history museum, life onsite. There are a number of out buildings that could be used for such purposes in warm weather. The Curran Homestead has repeatedly used tents and canopies for “gatherings,” and these are a good way to achieve shelter for such programming in warm weather. The main house and gift shop building are possible sites for inclement weather and colder seasons. The possibility is there for year round programming, and that practice would further The Homestead’s role as an ongoing and permanent educational resource in the community rather than an occasional place of functions. Areas within the farmhouse that presently serve as historical tableau might serve greater purpose as areas for active and participatory educational programming.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) provides funding for educational programming for museums, and there have been a number of institutions similar to The Homestead that have found funding for making their collections of material culture effective tools for learning about the arts. The NEA’s Learning in the Arts For Children and Youth Grants should be of particular interest. Given that there is currently no arts programming linked to The Homestead’s material culture, a decision would need to be made to broaden the focus of the museum to include “creativity and education in the arts” as part of its educational mission. This would not in any way effect the current mission but simply create new ways of appreciating and utilizing the facilities and collections for educational purposes. Such a grant, with its emphasis on “children and youth acquiring knowledge and understanding of and skills in the arts,” could fit nicely with the museum’s current collection and the educational needs of the community. The museum’s offering of potential “hands-on” learning experiences centered around rural, agricultural life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers a potentially good match to this grant’s goal of “participatory learning” for community-based learning, outside the “regular school day.” There is a potential for creating weekly after-school programs with the existing material culture onsite.
This “learning” could be accomplished not only through after-school programming but “summer arts education” as well. Such summer programming could similarly focus on school-age children acquiring new “knowledge and skills” as well as gaining a lifelong interest in not only arts and culture but local community, history, and livelihoods, which is directly linked to Maine standards for fourth graders. The Homestead would have to staff the site with “skilled artists” and “teachers” from the area to make such a program possible. The museum’s own collection of tools, farming implements, buildings, landscape ( including specimens of flora and fauna), domestic appliances, furnishings, and, potentially, the development of recorded, print and audio, narratives associated with them and their origins could all be subject to arts programming. Such programming could be a significant source of earned income for the museum as well as serve to humanize it in the eyes of its constituents.
There are a number of other grants that are available for further development of educational outreach to particularly pre-school children, and these would be worth further research by the museum. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (ILMS), specifically, its National Leadership Grants, provide funding for the development and implementation of educational programming with “engaging activities to help develop the skills needed to reach [school] readiness as well as for an “after school arts and a homework assistance center” that “supports mothers and children through learning and play” in recent years. Such a project would be applicable to both the needs of current and potential future visitors. Such grants emphasize “welcoming and supporting activities for parents to participate with their children as families” (ILMS).
The fact that The Homestead is located near the Fields Pond Audubon Center is especially fortuitous, for it could allow for partnership programming which would justify parents and caregivers traveling out to The Homestead on a weekday or weekend for something more than one purpose and for more than one hour or two for a specific program at The Homestead. Both institutions could simply seek to have their unique programs scheduled so that the public could participant in both; this would appeal to those concerned with conserving fuel expenses and limited time. Certainly, proximity to this well established institution warrants nurturing the potential residual effects of its student and family visitation.
Networking the stories The Homestead tells and the experiences it provides in order to have greater impact and relevancy to its visitors’ experience might be realized by creating programming that specifically complements the themes of nature and environment so important to the Fields Pond experience. This type of networking would provide greater impact and relevancy to its visitors’ experience. It could be the “hook” to get Fields Pond visitors down the road to The Homestead too, and “once you get them in then you can get them back” says Carl Nold, President and CEO of Historic New England and Chairperson of the American Association of Museums.
The fact that one of the 2003 recipients of ILMS Learning Opportunity Grants was the similarly small institution the Essex County Historical Society, in upstate New York, evidences that there is a possibility for funding similar projects at The Curran Homestead with large federal funding institutions. Such a proposal would likely seek funds for a “permanent presence in local schools expanding educational services.” It could also seek to create a “presence on [its] museum website,” which could begin before the protracted and required application process with proactive steps to incorporate educational resources in the website content. The tuition for public participation in such programming could, like the Essex County, NY grant recipient, could be sought through subsidization for targeted low-income families in Penobscot and Hancock counties. Ronald McDonald House Charities is yet another organization that provides grant money “for sponsored membership and free admissions for low income families, and this is worth consideration once educational programming has been organized; the Maine Discovery Museum has been a recent beneficiary of this funding (2007). The “application and review process” for such grants is often time consuming, taking from eight to eighteen months in the case of ILMS grants. Having a comprehensive educational plan with some programming in place and ongoing would be necessary before beginning the application process for grants promising tuition subsidization.
One of the most important considerations in planning marketing and development for an institution like The Curran Homestead is continually broadening its audience. A website would serve in targeting new people. A potentially receptive audience is the parents of sixth graders and under, and the children themselves. The museum has served an audience of children and their parents, relatives, guardians, friends, and caregivers; there could be an increased emphasis on children and those who accompany them. Programming should provide greater emphasis on an experience for children. Family and community based learning experiences should be further emphasized. Such a circumstance might be a focus of marketing as the museum continues to seek new audiences. Knowing who parents are should be a focus of current marketing concerns, for these will ultimately affect the pursuit of grants for educational programming. New families are migrating to Maine. Gen-Xers are a significant part of this demographic, and these may be a group that the museum specifically focuses on in the future.
Educational programming can be an integral part of a museum’s earned income revenues (Genoways 155). The museum could be marketed specifically to parents seeking programming for their pre-school children during both the work week and weekend. “At home” mothers and fathers are always seeking new daytime activities, and there are only so many story hours, swimming lessons at the “Y,” and playtimes scheduled within a community the size of Orrington and its environs. Advertizing scheduled weekly offerings of story and/or activity hours that connect thematically with Maine traditions, heritage, landscape, and agriculture could be a draw for this audience. Revenues would come by way of subscription to such activities whereby a seasonal or monthly bargain fee could be charged for each child or family participating. A membership card to this activity could identify subscribers. Paying per visit would be a more expensive alternative. Such programming for especially children of pre-school age is never sufficient in any community.
A marketing campaign specifically devoted to recognizing the needs of twenty and thirty something parents would serve the causes of increased participation and visitation. Gen-Xers (1965-1981) are the parents of “three fourths of [all] elementary school children” in the US, says James Chung, president of Reach Advisors, a Massachusetts-based marketing firm and specialist on the generation ( Gardiner 2006). Knowing them would help to bring greater numbers to The Curran Homestead fold.
Gen-Xers are a “different breed” than their baby boomer predecessors, for they are more likely to move for college or career, “marry later,” “have children later,” and “likely to find themselves distant from family support networks,” and more likely to take time off” for the sake of their kids ( Johnston and Chung). Fathers are especially unlike the generation before with their “paternity leaves,” rejection of “overtime,” and rushing home to spend time with their kids (Wen 2005). They are a generation that characteristically likes “getting involved and meeting new people,” yet are “not living up to the giving patterns to non-profit institutions like their parents may have been.
Given these factors, it might be prudent for The Curran Homestead to direct some marketing towards the specific characteristics of this parent group. Focusing on this group’s participation through “volunteerism” has been seen as a means to compensate for the widening gap in this group’s negligible giving habits, and this is being seen in New York State’s capitol region where one Gen-X volunteer, among a growing number, claims “volunteering gives him a sense of gratification and credibility in an uncertain world” ( Gardiner 2006). The museum should emphasize a role whereby it serves as a conduit for interaction between community members thereby targeting specifically this group’s characteristic disconnect with community. A strategy might call attention to the fact that The Curran Homestead brings parents with similar experiences and lifestyles together as well as people of all ages. Greater understanding of this by the museum might serve to turn specifically Gen-Xers on to giving to this newer institution when they as a demographic are more characteristically “turned-off by the cultures and images associated with long standing charities” ( Panepento 2005). Inviting individuals to the site for more frequent social gathering is a means to insure greater volunteerism.
The Curran Homestead has the potential to be more effectively touted as a vehicle for community building through the development of greater educational programming. A relationship with area schools will be an important step, but overtures should be made to day-care providers and pre-schools too. Weekday (i.e. after-school, field trips) and weekend programming on and offsite could be developed. The museum could assist individuals or groups in satisfying increasingly demanding curriculums; for example, resources can be provided for Grades, 1, 3, 4, and 6 that include a study of family, societies, and communities in Maine. Maine history, commerce, and livelihoods embody The Curran Homestead experience, and, therefore, it is perfectly suitable for assisting teachers in satisfying state standards and aligning itself with Maine State Learning Results. Core curriculums like social studies, in addition to English language arts and the visual arts, would be targeted through programming that focuses on the use of the museum’s material culture for purposes of discussion, writing, reading, story telling, and the use of a variety of art media, among others.
In conclusion, The Curran Homestead would be well served by a vigorous campaign to interest area childcare centers and schools that specifically serve pre and elementary school children in educational programming. Programming that focuses on arts and humanities making use of not only onsite material culture but digital representations, i.e. photographs of it, online though the museum’s website. This programming would focus on state standards in a variety of disciplines. Grants, offered by the ILMS, NEA, and others (The Maine State Archives), that promote inclusion of low-income audiences, community-based learning, arts education, school readiness, after-school, and summer programming should be actively pursued after initial steps are made to create a comprehensive education plan for the museum and its website.
Proposed Adult and Youth Courses and Programming for After-School, Fun Saturdays, and Summer
Rural Maine Life and Its Global Connection: There are many possibilities for partnerships with local institutions for funding and programming. There are also possibilities for partnerships with distant institutions. The World Awareness Children’s Museum (WACM) in Glens Falls, New York maintains an ongoing cultural exchange program and partnership with schools in the US and abroad. Part of their mission includes collecting youth art that is thematically linked to a student’s culture. Through an arrangement with teachers, art is created that characterizes the lives of schoolchildren which is subsequently exchanged with artwork similarly created by another class in another part of the world. The point is that schoolchildren can communicate through visual art with a global community about their cultural identity. Greater understandings about each other evolve without the stumbling blocks of verbal communication.
The WACM has always been successful with acquiring art produced from abroad but getting American teachers to participate has often been a challenge. Given the mission of The Curran Homestead, a program that allows for a conversation about the unique characteristics of Maine rural life and its traditions with school children could evolve through a program which allows a museum educator to visit area schools and facilitate art making centered around this theme. The art produced could be merchandized and used for traveling exhibitions (displays at local and statewide businesses). The art work could be exchanged with classrooms abroad, and such a conversation about others like us in other lands can evolve with the public through a variety of methods of presentation. Overtures could be made to WACM to develop a joint project and joint application for funding.
Saturday Games
This would provide a venue for parents and their kids to play games together rather than stay at home and watch TV or play video games. Tents with tables could be the environment for good old fashioned board game playing and the like. Musicians could be invited to practice as accompaniment to the play or old records could be amplified through a PA system. The point would be that the Curran Homestead becomes associated with fun for families and as a place for the community to come together and interact. Games provided. Admission fee for parents and children necessitated.
Square Dance ( “Ho-Down Saturdays at the Curran Homestead”)
What happened to community dances (Block-dances, “Ho-down” in the barn)? This could be the theme for an adult fundraising event as well as an after school/Saturday program in which traditional folk dance and music is revisited and practiced in a fun learning experience.
An annual summer dance (the making of a new tradition) could become a fundraising event. Wooden flooring could be rented and set up on the lawn with tenting for inclement weather. Participants might be required to show up in period dress that connects with The Homestead’s origin with their ticket in hand. Live entertainment and food could be elements of such a fundraiser. Local media would be invited for public relations, and staff could solicit membership for The Curran Homestead, including among seasonal residents.
Say “Goat Cheese”
Goats require little land and are suitable to rocky terrains characteristic of Maine. How does one go about raising them, and how do you go about making cheese from its milk. Learn these basics. Make cheese.
Blacksmithing
A challenging offering, for it may be that such skills are maintained and regulated by the State of Maine? Leonard’s Mill offers a summer workshop in blacksmithing. Such skills were often a reality of the small family farm when larger blacksmithing establishments were not available. If possible, a portable and temporary work area might be set-up onsite for a weekend course. Such an offering would depend on the feasibility of being able to set-up such tools and work area in a reasonably short amount of time. The participants would learn the essentials of fire-making, bellowing, simple iron heating and bending, shaping. This may evolve into larger projects. Given that acetylene torches were available in the late 19th century, a course in simple welding and brazing could also be offered, and would undoubtedly be a popular offering. Safety would be a concern, and insurance issues might be quelled with the requirement that participants provide evidence that they are insured if injured. There are supplementary insurance plans that would cover a participant for such an educational endeavor, and these would be solely the participant’s responsibility. Such measures are taken by many area schools that are no longer responsible for carrying injury insurance for students. A form is sent home with students, and parents are required to provide insurance information and a signature affirming their knowledge of the insurance coverage policies. This would all be disclosed in the course application and literature.
Knitting: Students would learn the essentials of materials and tools. Participants will complete a project using a variety of techniques offered in class. Materials for completing or participating in this course could be offered in the gift shop for a nominal fee. A materials fee could be included in the tuition.
Crocheting
Quilting
Rug Hooking
Looming
With a large number of local weavers who produce fabrics etc., it might be easy to find people to spread the knowledge of weaving to a group of eager participants using a variety of locally produced raw materials like wool, alpaca fiber, and goat hair. Materials provided in the gift shop. Looms? Could include one instruction loom whereby participants are introduced to the essentials in limited classes with a limited number of participants.
Caning Chairs
Learning the essentials of materials and tools. Students could re-cane donated chairs. These would become part of The Curran Homesteads furnishings or they could bring in their own personal objects for refurbishment. Materials could be sold at the gift shop. Traditional materials like dried cattails might be had onsite and prepared as a Boy Scout project, students seeking community service projects for graduation, or through volunteers (docents).
Basket Making : A partnership might be formed with the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor for such an endeavor as could other course proposals be realized through some type of partnership allowing for shared responsibilities with local museums like the Maine Maritime Museum. Materials for such an offering could be had from onsite resources. This would be in keeping with the Curran Homestead’s mission of being a living history museum that also seeks to recreate the various industries that were once realized by small Maine farms.
Foraging : Identifying edibles in the wild. There are many interested in what there is for the finding, preparing, and consuming in the Maine wild. Parsnips, mushrooms, berries, greens, and the like are just some of the edible treasures. There are many with the expertise to show us what there is free for the taking. Caution observed.
Home Entertainment 1900 Style
Offer an alternative to our contemporary lives with a program that re-introduces the card games, board games, puppets, playmaking, and music of ancestors. Participants might include separate groups of specific age.
Fly Fishin’
How many of us are curious about the art of fly casting and fly making? Amateur experts share their knowledge. Participants learn the fundamentals.
Parlor Music Circa 1905
Participants will gather around the collections vintage Victrola and listen to music from the area. Eats and social interaction emphasized, and possibly dancing. Music enthusiasts can share their own records with the group and their stories, and this would obviously not focus exclusively on 1905 and thereabouts but from multiple generations of music appreciation through 78s, 45s, and 33rpm records exclusively. These gatherings, and the stories revealed about music tastes, might contribute to the museum’s oral history collection.
Jug Band Workshop
Participants will construct a stringed washtub Bass, tambourines from household items, and other music makers. Jugs and washboards provided. Participants will learn simple skills in composition and performance using instruments found or constructed. Lemonade served. Kids K-5, Teen Group, Adults.
Banjo Lesson Saturdays
Participants supply their own bangos. Accomplished bangos share appreciation for and the basics of banjo music. With this type of arrangement the museum could offer a profit sharing arrangement with instructors.
Naïve Portraiture
Even after photography was invented itinerant painters crossed the countryside with wood panels and brushes creating likenesses for a fee. Participants will learn the rudiments of oil painting.
Photography Circa 1909
Participants experience the ubiquitous box camera of the past through their own construction of a pinhole camera with found materials. They take pictures and share them.
Stamp Collecting
Especially with the long winters, and before TV and videos took their time away, Maine kids collected things like stamps. In the 1890s throughout the first half of the twentieth century kids spent much time with their collections, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the more famous amateur philatelists. This hobby is not just about finding stamps and sticking them in an album. There is knowledge about condition and the variety of types that is known be fewer. Stamp experts will impart this knowledge to them. Kids can trade and share their collections with each other in this Saturday venue. Stamp collecting supplies, which are sometimes hard to find today, could be had in the gift shop. Old timers could share their collections and the stories that go with them ( oral history ). Display ( compliments of the Curran Homestead) could be set up at local businesses or institutions like banks for further PR.
The Curran Homestead Gift Shop could offer for sale materials related to course offerings.
Maine State Archives Grants
This institution is still in the midst of making its offerings available for this year; these grants are solely dependent on the State’s budget. It is anticipated that there will be an opportunity to create an educational partnership with area schools through such an award. The following could be funded by a number of grants both State and Federal.
With each day unfortunately many with valuable skills and stories from the past to share are lost. A program of documenting Maine’s past on audio cassette/digital storage could assist in preserving and utilizing a potentially rich resource for learning about Maine identity for students now and in the future. Some possible themes that would be worthy of seeking out and collecting as oral histories might include:
The Curran Homestead
Who were the Currans? Interview contemporary Currans and their memories of the family homestead. What was here that isn’t here now?
The Curran Homestead Restoration and Refurbishment
Have volunteers from the past fifteen years tell the story of what the Curran Homestead looked like at the beginning of its museum status and how its present condition was achieved.
This week I spoke with Irv Marsters , and he informed me that oral histories focusing on The Curran Homestead were done five or six years by UMO , but that no one had ever listened to the final project. These involved members of the Curran family. Tracking these down and getting copies would be a first step in planning out such a project. These oral histories could become part of The Curran Homestead’s website.
Tools & Materials
Explores the relationship between occupations and the tools and materials by which they were realized (logging, maple sugaring, farming, fishing etc.)
Native American Life
Hunting and Fishing
Building My Home
Entertainment
Downeast Maine
What is it that is unique about this region of the US? Participants would be made aware of some the unique traditions of this area and their origin.
Immigration (4th and 5th grade)
Who were these people? Who are these people?
What did they contribute to farming in Maine in the past and in the present?
Why did they come, and what attracts them today?
What traditions did/do they bring with them?
The Curran Homestead could create a scripted framework by which storytellers are introduced. This would more obviously connect these individual’s stories to The Curran Homestead and its specific history. A multimedia presentation could be part of this. Students would seek out their own oral histories to add to the collection making contact with family friends, relatives, or acquaintances with worthy experiences to share and be recorded. Students would propose to interview each interviewee to their teachers and these would require an approval by the teacher and a formal permission slip signed by interviewees granting permission to the State and The Curran Homestead to use the recording for educational purposes. This would insure that there would a standard of potential usefulness/pertinence for all the histories collected. In sum, Museum educators from The Curran Homestead would model the process by which interviews are given by students. Students would learn by experience an interview in class in which they also participate assisting in a Q & A with the guest storyteller in an initial visit to their classroom. Follow-up visits would also be part of this programming, and students would offer their progress for discussion. Ultimately, all participating students would make a visit to The Curran Homestead itself. The initial visit and oral history orchestrated by museum educators from The Curran Homestead would be recorded and would contribute to the collection of oral histories. Students would learn by seeing and doing. Teachers would contribute in nurturing the skills of interviewing, reviewing the results, and follow-ups about these individual storytellers connection to Maine identity. These would be further reinforced by subsequent follow-ups by the museum educator.
Developing a program of using oral histories to satisfy ELA and social studies standards would be at the forefront of current pedagogy with its emphasis on collecting and using primary source information for the purposes of critical thinking and understanding about the past and present. Student participants would be subject to such learning experiences as story telling and acquire such skills as first hand information gathering through interviewing and note-taking, among others. There would also be an element of public speaking because students would be acting as interviewers in these recording that would become a public resource. Students would share their experiences with this project. The Curran Homestead would provide guest storytellers who could offer informal narratives that in some way relate thematically to the material culture of the museum itself. The grant would provide funding for cassette recorders ( or digital recorders) and educators for the implementation of such a program.
The program would create a collection of oral histories that would insure the preservation of some of Maine’s past while also further contributing to The Curran Homestead’s evolving identity as an educational resource for Maine citizens and schools receptive to cooperative educational programming with the museum. Such a project could be used for public relations purposes, for such a project would be of interest to the local, state, and national media. The oral histories collected would become part of the Maine State Archives collection. Participating schools and The Curran Homestead would also preserve copies for their continued use.
Creating a website with audio offerings might be key to creating a resource for area teachers and others. No building would be needed to house audio cassette or digital recordings. All the recordings could be housed in cyberspace making them always available and requiring no staff to physically locate them. Of course, a webmaster would be essential for managing these files. This means of storage and delivery of “new collections” could be had relatively cheaply. Podcasting has become increasingly popular with not only techies but more general consumers. The software for downloading and editing digital audio are free with MacIntosh systems; GarageBand software is really a great product for downloading your digital audio files and producing quality recordings for sharing on the Internet. PC users can find the free download for Audacity software online, and this more primitive editing software can be utilized at no cost. The cost for making the proposed collection of oral histories available online would only entail having a large storage capacity for continual additions to the site as well as someone to manage these. Volunteers could be trained to manage these files.
Funding for such a project might be had through current grants like the National Archives and Records Administration’s Basic Projects grants, specifically, the Electronic Records Project. This supports projects that will lead to sustainable electronic records archives that preserve digital records with enduring historical value. The ILMS and the National Endowment for the Humanities provides funding for Digital Partnerships with their Advancing Knowledge Grants that might assist The Curran Homestead in such a project. Making a decision to take the first steps towards consultation with these funding institutions may be the first step in deciding the feasibility of realizing such a project.
References
DiSalvo, B.J., and A. Franzen-Sheehan. “Expanding Art Museums into Humanities Classrooms: Research on Online Curricula for Cross-Disciplinary Study.” J.Trant and D. Bearman. Eds., Museums and the Wb 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, March 31, 2007, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/diSalvo/diSalvo.html (accessed August 5, 2008).
Gardiner, Bob. “The ‘Me’ Generation Gives Back.” Albany Times Union, September 24, 2006, http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=518854&category=BUSINESS&newsdate=9/24/2006 (accessed December 2, 2007).
Genoways, Hugh H., and Lynn M. Ireland. Museum Administration; An Introduction. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2003.
Institute of Museum and Library Services, http://www.imls.gov/results.asp?state=0&city=7description=on&inst=&keyword=&program=gt_1010&sort=year&year=8 ( accessed September 9, 2008)
Johnstone, Sally, and James Chung. “Moms Wanna Rock Too,” Ski Area Management, Vol.46-2, Page 44, http://www.saminfo.com/issues/article.php?tid=3545
Maine Discovery Museum, Bangor, Maine, Newsletter, December, 2007.
National Endowment for the Arts. “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth Grants,” http://www.nea.gov.grants/apply/GAP08/LITA.html (accessed September 5, 2008)
National Endowment for the Humanities. “Advancing Knowledge: The ILMS/NEH Digital Partnership.” http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelenes/Digital_Partnership.html (accessed September 5, 2008).
NARA ( National Archives and Records Administration). The National Historical Publication and Records (NHPRC), “Grant Announcement: Electronic Records Projects.” http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/announcement/electronic.html (accessed September 10, 2008)
Nold, Carl. President and CEO, Historic New England and Chairperson , AAM, Lecture, Tufts University, Museum Studies Program, Medford, Massachusetts, December 10, 2007.
Panepeto, Peter, “Connecting with Generation X; Charities Look For New Ways to Reach Out to the Under 40 Set,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy/Fund Raising (March 31, 2005), http://www.philanthropy.com/free/articles/v17/i12/12003301.htm (accessed December 2, 2007).
Peacock, D., and J.Brownbill, “Audiences, Visitors, Users: Reconceptualizing Users of Museum Online Content and Services,” J.Trant and D.Bearman, Eds., Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics ( March 31, 2007).
Richardson, Jim, “Rebranding,” Museum Marketing Blog, (September 16, 2007), http://www.museumbrandingblog.co.uk/?cat=3 (accessed September 1, 2008).
Schwartz, Nancy. “Shape Your Nonprofit Website to Generate the Actions You Need.” (May 25, 2007) http://www.nancyschwartz.comeffectivenonprofitwebsites.html/ (accessed December 7, 2007).
Viera, Diane L. “Strike Up the Brand: Creating or Enhancing Your Museum’s Brand Identity, American association for the State and Local History Technical Leaflet 232, 2005.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
A Museum Near and Dear to Our Hearts
The following museum described might serve as a model for a proposed plan of creating both a photograph and oral history archives on The Curran Homestead's new website as put forth in the September, 2008 Board Meeting and included in the "Modest Proposal" posted on this blog site. We are an institution whose tangible collection consists exclusively of the farm homestead itself, tools and accoutrements, and household furnishing, applicances, and sundries, but there is another undeveloped resource that we have, and this is the many stories that people who come to Homestead as visitors and volunteers share with us. Additionally, it is The Curran Homestead's exemplication of American farm and home that make its purpose so powerful to not only Mainers but all Americans, for we all share that experience of family, friendship, and hearth in all its permutations. Creating a resource from which the public can learn about The Curran Homestead and share their own homestead histories and experiences seems to be an even greater realization of our mission.
We will likely never include in our collection a sizeable archives of paper documents, photographs, and the like for research purposes about the family farm, about the Curran family and their experience specifically, or rural folk in Maine and in general. Without these educational resources we are missing out on an audience for our living history farm and museum; we are missing out on the utilization of the most important communication and education medium of our time. The Shiloh Museum is a model for us to learn from because it has a collection of modest value and survives through modest funding. It, like most museums, sees a necessity to grow and to develop its educational outreach. Recent innovations like digitalization and a website provide such a museum of modest means the opportunity to build a collection of immense educational value with little money and with relatively no need for the expense of additional facilities and storage like never before.
Along with its physical plant, the Shiloh Museum maintains a virtual museum of incredible proportions that continues to grow through the donation of digital reproductions of real photographs from the public. To further assist The Curran Homestead in telling the story they have to tell and in teaching the things they wish to teach, a similar collection of digital photographs and digitized oral histories would not only assist in this but assist the present collection in more effectively serving its purpose. Take a look at my essay on this museum which we might learn from as we explore new development strategies.
The Shiloh Museum Serves a Unique Purpose
It is fair to say that the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, which was founded in 1965 and opened three years later, evolved and is still evolving like most museums that survived their initial humble beginnings as a repository for a single collection of donated artifacts and resources, but this museum aspires to something unique. Originally conceived as an institution limited to acquiring and displaying "items of historical value and to encourage and promote historical and cultural interest in the Springdale [Arkansas] area," it was eventually given its present name which more than anything else declared an even greater "scope for potential visitors" beyond Springdale, a name that had replaced the original town’s name "Shiloh" in the 1870s, to embrace "other cities and counties" in Northwestern Arkansas as well as a worldwide community through its Internet website. Its present manifestation has resulted from an aggressive collection policy and efforts to create better exhibits, educational outreach programs, and larger research facilities.
An original donation of some 10,000 Native American artifacts, 260 books, and pamphlets early necessitated, on the part of elected trustees, the employment of a part-time scholar for the purpose of cataloguing; this set the tone for subsequent decisions to make this endeavor more than merely a local historical society with minimal responsibility to its community; it sought the challenge of "documenting life in [the entirety] of Northwest Arkansas. The acquisition of vintage and contemporary photographs of the area, presently numbering to 700,000, initially evolved from a federal grant. This collection, which helped earn the museum an "Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History,"drew attention to it on a national level. The museum’s physical footprint has also grown considerably through the assistance of several significant federal grants which have increased its staff, services, and size. Its present campus of two acres includes, in addition to a new 1.1 million dollar visitors’ facility, six historic buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth century moved to the site as well as several buildings of local value in situ.
Historically, Shiloh serves some of the same populist goals evidenced by many museums in America since the 1930s with its mission centered on contributing to public education for all through programs reaching the young and the adult alike; these programs, which have included "lecture series, crafts workshops, and tours for school classes" have sought to add to a greater understanding of a regional landscape, its people, and history within the mosaic of America. Its educational outreach programs to school children make use of such standard tools to museum education as "discovery boxes" and "portable programs" brought to the classroom. It is here that these future inheritors of Shiloh’s important collection of photos, garnered from donations from the humble family albums and shoe boxes of one-time or long-time residents of Arkansas and others, benefit from the unique stories they can tell about the past. The museum has an ongoing outreach for donations or loans of photographs of or related to the Northwest Arkansas, and this promises further growth for the museum.
These primary documents especially promise great future educational value for not only those visiting the museum or benefitting from its educational programs directly, but to a worldwide community of the interested through digitization, and this is undoubtedly anticipated in Shiloh’s attention to its offerings for scholarly research via its evolving website. In a 1993 exhibition entitled "Vanishing Northwest Arkansas," the museum essentially proclaims through this title the rationale at the heart of its aggressive collecting of photographic images of a rural area of one-time fruit and timber production that has seen both boom and bust repeatedly, human migrations, the disappearance of folk traditions, and an acceleration of life that once "moved at a slower pace."
Such a museum as Shiloh, born in the early tradition of organizing a local institution to house bequeathed cabinets of curiosities, in this case Native American artifacts, and the like, offers in its evolved manifestation something far greater and unique to the public through its focus on the humble private collections of Americans’ photographs. Through this collecting strategy a priceless record of peoples and cultures is offered that larger museums have often ignored or overlooked in lieu of more iconic imagery that was first disseminated through mass media. This is perhaps best evidenced in the Shiloh’s current exhibition "Serving Our Clients: Rural Relief in Newton County," which is centered around an album of some 100 captioned photographs taken by a couple, the Nicolsons, who worked for the WPA Rural Relief Program in rural Arkansas in 1935. The donated album was recently discovered in an attic after the couple had passed away. These images are an invaluable addition to the ubiquitous images by Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and the like from the same era that many Americans know. Although intended as an "official" view of the Great Depression as it effected specifically the Ozarks by one-time employees of a government project, their re-discovery offers a fresh look at history through the eyes of its participants. The current Shiloh exhibit of these photographs by these onsite caseworkers is in sharp contrast to photos by Lange, Evans, and others that were condemned by contemporaneous administration officials as "too artistic and loaded with social commentary for their needs." With these types of collections presented through institutions like the Shiloh, there is an ever greater possibility of allowing the multiple stories that make up actual history to be revealed and examined by the public rather than tragically allowing one or two stories alone to serve the purpose.
Similarly, institutions like The Curran Homestead too may fill a void in history through their access to the many stories of its volunteers, visitors, and acquaintances, for among its many offerings is simply its role as a place where people come together and share their past family farm experiences and have new one. Creating an archive of these stories through use of new digital mediums to present oral histories and photographs via a website could be a valuable resource for educational purposes to ever greater numbers.
Mission Statement:
" The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History serves the public by providing resources for finding meaning, enjoyment, and inspiration in the exploration of the Arkansas Ozarks."
We will likely never include in our collection a sizeable archives of paper documents, photographs, and the like for research purposes about the family farm, about the Curran family and their experience specifically, or rural folk in Maine and in general. Without these educational resources we are missing out on an audience for our living history farm and museum; we are missing out on the utilization of the most important communication and education medium of our time. The Shiloh Museum is a model for us to learn from because it has a collection of modest value and survives through modest funding. It, like most museums, sees a necessity to grow and to develop its educational outreach. Recent innovations like digitalization and a website provide such a museum of modest means the opportunity to build a collection of immense educational value with little money and with relatively no need for the expense of additional facilities and storage like never before.
Along with its physical plant, the Shiloh Museum maintains a virtual museum of incredible proportions that continues to grow through the donation of digital reproductions of real photographs from the public. To further assist The Curran Homestead in telling the story they have to tell and in teaching the things they wish to teach, a similar collection of digital photographs and digitized oral histories would not only assist in this but assist the present collection in more effectively serving its purpose. Take a look at my essay on this museum which we might learn from as we explore new development strategies.
The Shiloh Museum Serves a Unique Purpose
It is fair to say that the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, which was founded in 1965 and opened three years later, evolved and is still evolving like most museums that survived their initial humble beginnings as a repository for a single collection of donated artifacts and resources, but this museum aspires to something unique. Originally conceived as an institution limited to acquiring and displaying "items of historical value and to encourage and promote historical and cultural interest in the Springdale [Arkansas] area," it was eventually given its present name which more than anything else declared an even greater "scope for potential visitors" beyond Springdale, a name that had replaced the original town’s name "Shiloh" in the 1870s, to embrace "other cities and counties" in Northwestern Arkansas as well as a worldwide community through its Internet website. Its present manifestation has resulted from an aggressive collection policy and efforts to create better exhibits, educational outreach programs, and larger research facilities.
An original donation of some 10,000 Native American artifacts, 260 books, and pamphlets early necessitated, on the part of elected trustees, the employment of a part-time scholar for the purpose of cataloguing; this set the tone for subsequent decisions to make this endeavor more than merely a local historical society with minimal responsibility to its community; it sought the challenge of "documenting life in [the entirety] of Northwest Arkansas. The acquisition of vintage and contemporary photographs of the area, presently numbering to 700,000, initially evolved from a federal grant. This collection, which helped earn the museum an "Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History,"drew attention to it on a national level. The museum’s physical footprint has also grown considerably through the assistance of several significant federal grants which have increased its staff, services, and size. Its present campus of two acres includes, in addition to a new 1.1 million dollar visitors’ facility, six historic buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth century moved to the site as well as several buildings of local value in situ.
Historically, Shiloh serves some of the same populist goals evidenced by many museums in America since the 1930s with its mission centered on contributing to public education for all through programs reaching the young and the adult alike; these programs, which have included "lecture series, crafts workshops, and tours for school classes" have sought to add to a greater understanding of a regional landscape, its people, and history within the mosaic of America. Its educational outreach programs to school children make use of such standard tools to museum education as "discovery boxes" and "portable programs" brought to the classroom. It is here that these future inheritors of Shiloh’s important collection of photos, garnered from donations from the humble family albums and shoe boxes of one-time or long-time residents of Arkansas and others, benefit from the unique stories they can tell about the past. The museum has an ongoing outreach for donations or loans of photographs of or related to the Northwest Arkansas, and this promises further growth for the museum.
These primary documents especially promise great future educational value for not only those visiting the museum or benefitting from its educational programs directly, but to a worldwide community of the interested through digitization, and this is undoubtedly anticipated in Shiloh’s attention to its offerings for scholarly research via its evolving website. In a 1993 exhibition entitled "Vanishing Northwest Arkansas," the museum essentially proclaims through this title the rationale at the heart of its aggressive collecting of photographic images of a rural area of one-time fruit and timber production that has seen both boom and bust repeatedly, human migrations, the disappearance of folk traditions, and an acceleration of life that once "moved at a slower pace."
Such a museum as Shiloh, born in the early tradition of organizing a local institution to house bequeathed cabinets of curiosities, in this case Native American artifacts, and the like, offers in its evolved manifestation something far greater and unique to the public through its focus on the humble private collections of Americans’ photographs. Through this collecting strategy a priceless record of peoples and cultures is offered that larger museums have often ignored or overlooked in lieu of more iconic imagery that was first disseminated through mass media. This is perhaps best evidenced in the Shiloh’s current exhibition "Serving Our Clients: Rural Relief in Newton County," which is centered around an album of some 100 captioned photographs taken by a couple, the Nicolsons, who worked for the WPA Rural Relief Program in rural Arkansas in 1935. The donated album was recently discovered in an attic after the couple had passed away. These images are an invaluable addition to the ubiquitous images by Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and the like from the same era that many Americans know. Although intended as an "official" view of the Great Depression as it effected specifically the Ozarks by one-time employees of a government project, their re-discovery offers a fresh look at history through the eyes of its participants. The current Shiloh exhibit of these photographs by these onsite caseworkers is in sharp contrast to photos by Lange, Evans, and others that were condemned by contemporaneous administration officials as "too artistic and loaded with social commentary for their needs." With these types of collections presented through institutions like the Shiloh, there is an ever greater possibility of allowing the multiple stories that make up actual history to be revealed and examined by the public rather than tragically allowing one or two stories alone to serve the purpose.
Similarly, institutions like The Curran Homestead too may fill a void in history through their access to the many stories of its volunteers, visitors, and acquaintances, for among its many offerings is simply its role as a place where people come together and share their past family farm experiences and have new one. Creating an archive of these stories through use of new digital mediums to present oral histories and photographs via a website could be a valuable resource for educational purposes to ever greater numbers.
Mission Statement:
" The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History serves the public by providing resources for finding meaning, enjoyment, and inspiration in the exploration of the Arkansas Ozarks."
The Curran Homestead's Collections Policy
In order to complete a recent grant application I drafted and submitted the following Collections Policy. This is an important document for any nonprofit institution that collects and preserves a collection of objects. Although our collection is unique in that we maintain and preserve material culture for the purpose of using it in "hands-on" demonstrations and instruction ( something that we plan on doing a lot more of in the future ), we have an obligation to follow some of the practices of good museology. This "Policy" is by no means definitive, so your input will make it a better document than it is. It is not enough that we define our policy, but we will eventually need to realize it.
Collections Policy
Introduction
Located in a bucolic setting on Fields Pond in rural Orrington, ME, The Curran Homestead is a turn-of- the-century living history farm and museum. The Curran Homestead is the result of the wishes of the late Katherine Curran, whose family operated a subsistence farm consisting of animals, crops, and a woodlot providing enough cash to cover necessities. When Miss Curran died in 1991 her will directed a portion of the homestead to be preserved in its original form. The Curran Homestead steering committee proposed the creation of a living history farm and museum incorporating the house, barn, and related buildings on roughly 35 acres. The Homestead includes seven buildings: the barn, the main house, the Field house, the ell, a small livestock building, utility building, and a heavy equipment building. The Field house was the original farmhouse built in the early 1800s and occupied by the Field family. The main house was the Curran family home and provides a good example of a rural Maine home with a large kitchen, pantry, and double front rooms downstairs. Housed within all of these buildings and on the property is a collection of farm machinery, hand tools, and other accoutrements dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. In essence, all that one would need to raise a limited number of livestock, grow and harvest crops, produce milk, and other supplemental forms of income like the harvesting of ice and firewood at the turn-of-the century.
2. Mission Statement
The American family farm is disappearing from the nation’s landscape, and the loss of these in the State of Maine not only impacts American culture but a unique regional cultural identity. Preserving The Curran Homestead insures for future generations the values and customs of rural America representing a time when self-reliance, cooperation, industry, and thrift were honored traditions. The Curran Homestead enriches the lives of our children, offers our community many opportunities for wholesome family fun, and serves as an excellent educational resource through its preservation and dissemination of family farm know-how, maintenance and continued use of nineteenth and early twentieth century material culture, and facilitation of hands-on activities and programs. As a cultural organization, our primary focus is the historical preservation of life on the Maine family farm at the turn-of-the-20th century.
3. Definition of Collections
The collection consists of appliances, furnishings, and household sundries that were extant when The Curran Homestead established its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status as a living history farm and museum. In addition, there was also an incomplete collection of tools, dairy equipment, farm machinery, and sundry agricultural items extant, and many of these were from the nineteenth century. Most importantly, there was a large collection of wagons, sleighs, sleds, carriages, and horse drawn farm machinery including harrows, cultivators, and seeders with appropriate original traces, harnessing, yokes, horse collars, and miscellaneous tackle for these. During the short history of the museum there has also been a major private donation to the collection that included mid-twentieth century tractors, late nineteenth and early twentieth century harrows, seeders, and plows, among other implements. This donation also included tools and accoutrements for maple syrup harvesting. Additionally, there have been mnay small donations of objects during the past fifteen years plus of museum, and these have been made use of, put on display, or stored. In essence, The Curran Homestead’s collection consists of everything one might need to continue subsistence farming presently. The museum will continue to discover deficiencies in their collection though and seek to amend these through the solicitation of charitable donations of objects and monies as it draws closer to the goal of becoming a working farm with daily functions.
4. Collecting Plan
Material culture that is functional for some of the planned future educational programming projects is always under consideration. It is anticipated that courses will be developed for nights and summers in the near future. These will include demonstration and hands-on experiences with caning, preserving and canning, cooking, embroidery, knitting, book binding, and wagon wheel repair, among others. The volunteer instructors and demonstrators of the past have usually used their own tools and equipment, but The Curran Homestead actively considers such tools for its own collection and use when they are offered for donation.
Because of a large donation of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century equipment, farming implements, and tractors, the collection is presently dominated by objects that are beyond the originally planned period setting, the turn-of-the-century, for this living history museum. This donation though has made possible, without paid staff, a functioning and large vegetable garden, grounds maintenance, and a very popular maple syrup festival on farmland presently devoid of sugar maple trees. It is tentatively planned that some livestock, including draft horses, will eventually be part of the museum’s holdings, and that these will serve the function of future late nineteenth century farming demonstrations. Although the museum currently has much tackle for horse-drawn farming implements, carriages, wagons, and sleighs, the museum seeks the future donation of more functional versions of these, for many of the examples in the collection have been subject to deterioration making them only suitable for display.
5. Collections Management
There is a commitment to create both a comprehensive print record and computer-based record of all the holdings of the Curran Homestead within the next two years. Given the lack of a paid staff and the necessity to preserve and restore all the buildings that make up the physical plant of The Curran Homestead since its creation as a nonprofit entity using only volunteer labor and donation fifteen plus years ago, creating a collections database has not been a priority. Documentation of new acquisitions to the collection has only occurred in the past five years which leaves much of the collection undocumented.
Part of the task of creating a record of the holdings will be to organize those existing records of items donated to the collection in the past fifteen years. There will be a moratorium on the acquisition of any new donations to the collection during this organizational project in the near future, although many individuals are likely to continue as they have to make contact with the institution with the hope of securing a home for valued objects. These offers will be evaluated, and assurances will be given that we are temporarily unable to receive such a gift but will keep in touch and see to it that an arrangement can be made in the near future. A formal process of accession will be part of the record created in the next two years. Only objects that can benefit our current or future plans for fund raising and educational programming will be considered for accession.
As a nonprofit institution it is our responsibility to follow protocol regarding the donation of objects to our collection. This will involve the drafting of a form for the accessioning of objects, creating a list of third party appraisers so that charitable donations may be appraised and that donors receive compensation via tax credit for their charitable donation, and that the acquisition be formalized through thorough written documentation.
5A. De-accession
There are currently no plans to de-accession anything within the collection, but limited space and the financial means to better realize a specific moment in time, like the turn-of-the-century, will undoubtedly mean that older items will replace those newer ones onsite. A collections database will be the first step in formally accessioning objects into the collection, a task to date unrealized, thus providing a legally established time frame in order to eventually and legally de-accession objects deemed undesirable by the executive director and the board of directors.
6. Care and Maintenance
It is the goal of The Curran Homestead to use as much of its collection of objects of modest value for the purpose of both recreating life as it was and providing new educational experiences for the public. This necessitates that mechanical objects within the collection will be maintained in working order. Many of the larger objects in the collection, like tractors, require seasonal maintenance to remain in working order, and this should be of great importance when the financial situation of the museum permits. The cost of maintaining these objects should not take precedence over the museum’s ability to fulfill its educational mission.
6A. Conservation and Environment
It has always been the intention of the museum to not only maintain their collection of larger objects like farm implements, carriages, wagons, and sleighs but to initiate a program of restoration and repair making them all functional for the purposes of our seasonal events. The building of a blacksmith’s shed is anticipated for the site, and this will serve in making the maintenance, repair, and restoration part of the daily programming of the site. It is hoped that these will become learning experiences for the public.
Objects will be stored in barns and out buildings when possible, and these structures will be maintained to provide a dry and secure place of storage. It is especially important for the preservation of the collection that all objects large and small be sheltered during the winter months, although the limitations of space may prohibit this during the warmer seasons.
The Curran House will be heated during the winter months when possible to prevent damage to its interior, and staff will be cognizant of heat conservation by maintaining thermostats at an agreed upon temperature. The chimneys of the house will have regular maintenance, given that wood burning stoves are often in operation. Since the Curran House is currently the center of much of our programming its maintenance is a priority. In maintaining The Curran and Field houses onsite attention will be given to making these lead-free spaces as well as adherent to current safety and fire codes when possible and without altering visually the historical integrity of these structures. When possible references will be consulted to maintain other aspects of its historical integrity including furniture, wall coverings, paint choices, and fixtures; it is the desire of the museum to recreate the interior appearance of this structure as it may have appeared during the early occupancy of the Curran family.
6B. Inventory
A thorough inventory is planned in the near future.
7. Security
A comprehensive restoration of outbuilding and residential buildings has allowed for greater security. Doors have been repaired and fitted with new hardware. Greater security for the objects in the collection is necessitated, and a comprehensive inventory will be the first step in their defense. Once this inventory has been created a program of monitoring the entirety of the collection will be drafted.
November, 2008
Collections Policy
Introduction
Located in a bucolic setting on Fields Pond in rural Orrington, ME, The Curran Homestead is a turn-of- the-century living history farm and museum. The Curran Homestead is the result of the wishes of the late Katherine Curran, whose family operated a subsistence farm consisting of animals, crops, and a woodlot providing enough cash to cover necessities. When Miss Curran died in 1991 her will directed a portion of the homestead to be preserved in its original form. The Curran Homestead steering committee proposed the creation of a living history farm and museum incorporating the house, barn, and related buildings on roughly 35 acres. The Homestead includes seven buildings: the barn, the main house, the Field house, the ell, a small livestock building, utility building, and a heavy equipment building. The Field house was the original farmhouse built in the early 1800s and occupied by the Field family. The main house was the Curran family home and provides a good example of a rural Maine home with a large kitchen, pantry, and double front rooms downstairs. Housed within all of these buildings and on the property is a collection of farm machinery, hand tools, and other accoutrements dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. In essence, all that one would need to raise a limited number of livestock, grow and harvest crops, produce milk, and other supplemental forms of income like the harvesting of ice and firewood at the turn-of-the century.
2. Mission Statement
The American family farm is disappearing from the nation’s landscape, and the loss of these in the State of Maine not only impacts American culture but a unique regional cultural identity. Preserving The Curran Homestead insures for future generations the values and customs of rural America representing a time when self-reliance, cooperation, industry, and thrift were honored traditions. The Curran Homestead enriches the lives of our children, offers our community many opportunities for wholesome family fun, and serves as an excellent educational resource through its preservation and dissemination of family farm know-how, maintenance and continued use of nineteenth and early twentieth century material culture, and facilitation of hands-on activities and programs. As a cultural organization, our primary focus is the historical preservation of life on the Maine family farm at the turn-of-the-20th century.
3. Definition of Collections
The collection consists of appliances, furnishings, and household sundries that were extant when The Curran Homestead established its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status as a living history farm and museum. In addition, there was also an incomplete collection of tools, dairy equipment, farm machinery, and sundry agricultural items extant, and many of these were from the nineteenth century. Most importantly, there was a large collection of wagons, sleighs, sleds, carriages, and horse drawn farm machinery including harrows, cultivators, and seeders with appropriate original traces, harnessing, yokes, horse collars, and miscellaneous tackle for these. During the short history of the museum there has also been a major private donation to the collection that included mid-twentieth century tractors, late nineteenth and early twentieth century harrows, seeders, and plows, among other implements. This donation also included tools and accoutrements for maple syrup harvesting. Additionally, there have been mnay small donations of objects during the past fifteen years plus of museum, and these have been made use of, put on display, or stored. In essence, The Curran Homestead’s collection consists of everything one might need to continue subsistence farming presently. The museum will continue to discover deficiencies in their collection though and seek to amend these through the solicitation of charitable donations of objects and monies as it draws closer to the goal of becoming a working farm with daily functions.
4. Collecting Plan
Material culture that is functional for some of the planned future educational programming projects is always under consideration. It is anticipated that courses will be developed for nights and summers in the near future. These will include demonstration and hands-on experiences with caning, preserving and canning, cooking, embroidery, knitting, book binding, and wagon wheel repair, among others. The volunteer instructors and demonstrators of the past have usually used their own tools and equipment, but The Curran Homestead actively considers such tools for its own collection and use when they are offered for donation.
Because of a large donation of late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century equipment, farming implements, and tractors, the collection is presently dominated by objects that are beyond the originally planned period setting, the turn-of-the-century, for this living history museum. This donation though has made possible, without paid staff, a functioning and large vegetable garden, grounds maintenance, and a very popular maple syrup festival on farmland presently devoid of sugar maple trees. It is tentatively planned that some livestock, including draft horses, will eventually be part of the museum’s holdings, and that these will serve the function of future late nineteenth century farming demonstrations. Although the museum currently has much tackle for horse-drawn farming implements, carriages, wagons, and sleighs, the museum seeks the future donation of more functional versions of these, for many of the examples in the collection have been subject to deterioration making them only suitable for display.
5. Collections Management
There is a commitment to create both a comprehensive print record and computer-based record of all the holdings of the Curran Homestead within the next two years. Given the lack of a paid staff and the necessity to preserve and restore all the buildings that make up the physical plant of The Curran Homestead since its creation as a nonprofit entity using only volunteer labor and donation fifteen plus years ago, creating a collections database has not been a priority. Documentation of new acquisitions to the collection has only occurred in the past five years which leaves much of the collection undocumented.
Part of the task of creating a record of the holdings will be to organize those existing records of items donated to the collection in the past fifteen years. There will be a moratorium on the acquisition of any new donations to the collection during this organizational project in the near future, although many individuals are likely to continue as they have to make contact with the institution with the hope of securing a home for valued objects. These offers will be evaluated, and assurances will be given that we are temporarily unable to receive such a gift but will keep in touch and see to it that an arrangement can be made in the near future. A formal process of accession will be part of the record created in the next two years. Only objects that can benefit our current or future plans for fund raising and educational programming will be considered for accession.
As a nonprofit institution it is our responsibility to follow protocol regarding the donation of objects to our collection. This will involve the drafting of a form for the accessioning of objects, creating a list of third party appraisers so that charitable donations may be appraised and that donors receive compensation via tax credit for their charitable donation, and that the acquisition be formalized through thorough written documentation.
5A. De-accession
There are currently no plans to de-accession anything within the collection, but limited space and the financial means to better realize a specific moment in time, like the turn-of-the-century, will undoubtedly mean that older items will replace those newer ones onsite. A collections database will be the first step in formally accessioning objects into the collection, a task to date unrealized, thus providing a legally established time frame in order to eventually and legally de-accession objects deemed undesirable by the executive director and the board of directors.
6. Care and Maintenance
It is the goal of The Curran Homestead to use as much of its collection of objects of modest value for the purpose of both recreating life as it was and providing new educational experiences for the public. This necessitates that mechanical objects within the collection will be maintained in working order. Many of the larger objects in the collection, like tractors, require seasonal maintenance to remain in working order, and this should be of great importance when the financial situation of the museum permits. The cost of maintaining these objects should not take precedence over the museum’s ability to fulfill its educational mission.
6A. Conservation and Environment
It has always been the intention of the museum to not only maintain their collection of larger objects like farm implements, carriages, wagons, and sleighs but to initiate a program of restoration and repair making them all functional for the purposes of our seasonal events. The building of a blacksmith’s shed is anticipated for the site, and this will serve in making the maintenance, repair, and restoration part of the daily programming of the site. It is hoped that these will become learning experiences for the public.
Objects will be stored in barns and out buildings when possible, and these structures will be maintained to provide a dry and secure place of storage. It is especially important for the preservation of the collection that all objects large and small be sheltered during the winter months, although the limitations of space may prohibit this during the warmer seasons.
The Curran House will be heated during the winter months when possible to prevent damage to its interior, and staff will be cognizant of heat conservation by maintaining thermostats at an agreed upon temperature. The chimneys of the house will have regular maintenance, given that wood burning stoves are often in operation. Since the Curran House is currently the center of much of our programming its maintenance is a priority. In maintaining The Curran and Field houses onsite attention will be given to making these lead-free spaces as well as adherent to current safety and fire codes when possible and without altering visually the historical integrity of these structures. When possible references will be consulted to maintain other aspects of its historical integrity including furniture, wall coverings, paint choices, and fixtures; it is the desire of the museum to recreate the interior appearance of this structure as it may have appeared during the early occupancy of the Curran family.
6B. Inventory
A thorough inventory is planned in the near future.
7. Security
A comprehensive restoration of outbuilding and residential buildings has allowed for greater security. Doors have been repaired and fitted with new hardware. Greater security for the objects in the collection is necessitated, and a comprehensive inventory will be the first step in their defense. Once this inventory has been created a program of monitoring the entirety of the collection will be drafted.
November, 2008
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