Search Results

Historical Items

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Item 13868

Fact and Fiction Club tea, Houlton, 1906

Contributed by: Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum Date: circa 1906 Location: Houlton Media: Photographic print

Item 42077

Holiday Home, Camp Ellis, ca. 1890

Contributed by: Dyer Library/Saco Museum Date: circa 1890 Location: Saco Media: Print from glass negative

Item 20139

Wonders of Science playbill, Bridgton, 1895

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1895 Location: Bridgton Media: Ink on paper

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Architecture & Landscape

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Item 111663

York Institute, Saco, 1926

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1925–1926 Location: Saco Client: York Institute Architect: John Calvin Stevens and John Howard Stevens Architects

Item 116448

Dyer Library alterations, Saco, 1913-1917

Contributed by: Maine Historical Society Date: 1913–1917 Location: Saco Client: unknown Architect: John Calvin Stevens and John Howard Stevens Architects

Online Exhibits

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Exhibit

Bangor Railway & Electric Co. No. 76, ca. 1920

Trolley Travel

Trolleys were the cleanest and most efficient means of mass transit Maine has ever known.

Exhibit

Student Exhibit: Save the Skowhegan Grange & Granges in General

A brief history of the Grange in Skowhegan, its importance to community history, and a plea to save it from destruction.

Exhibit

Gladys Hasty Carroll, South Berwick, 1937

Capturing Arts and Artists in the 1930s

Emmie Bailey Whitney of the Lewiston Journal Saturday Magazine and her husband, noted amateur photographer G. Herbert Whitney, captured in words and photographs the richness of Maine's arts scene during the Great Depression.

Site Pages

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Site Page

'A Concise Statement' Shaker document, 1963

United Society of Shakers

View collections, facts, and contact information for this Contributing Partner.

Site Page

Libby and Co. Ice Wagon, Scarborough, ca. 1880

Scarborough Historical Society & Museum

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Site Page

Dyer Library/Saco Museum

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My Maine Stories

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Story

Rest Stop in Scarborough, Maine
by Lee Evans

This is about our first visit to Maine in 1998. My wife and I moved here from Maryland in 2007.

Story

Sustainable Futures
by Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar Middlebury College

Climate change is the biggest thing humans have ever done. So we need to think big as we take it on.

Story

From Pee Wee to Pro The Maine Way
by Danny Bolduc

I am the very first person from Maine to have played hockey in the Olympics and in the NHL.

Lesson Plans

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Lesson Plan

Engraving of Evangeline, by James Faed, ca. 1854

Maine's Acadian Community: "Evangeline," Le Grand Dérangement, and Cultural Survival

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: English Language Arts, Social Studies
This lesson plan will introduce students to the history of the forced expulsion of thousands of people from Acadia, the Romantic look back at the tragedy in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous epic poem Evangeline and the heroine's adoption as an Acadian cultural figure, and Maine's Acadian community today, along with their relations with Acadian New Brunswick and Nova Scotia residents and others in the Acadian Diaspora. Students will read and discuss primary documents, compare and contrast Le Grand Dérangement to other forced expulsions in Maine history and discuss the significance of cultural survival amidst hardships brought on by treaties, wars, and legislation.

Lesson Plan

Portland History: Lemuel Moody and the Portland Observatory

Grade Level: 3-5 Content Area: Social Studies
Lemuel Moody and the Portland Observatory Included are interesting facts to share with your students and for students, an interactive slide show available on-line at Maine Memory Network. The "Images" slide show allows students to place historical images of the Observatory in a timeline. Utilizing their observation skills students will place these images in chronological order by looking for changes within the built environment for clues. Also available is the "Maps" slide show, a series of maps from key eras in Portland's history. Students will answer the questions in the slide show to better understand the topography of Portland, the need for an Observatory and the changes in the landscape and the population centers.

Lesson Plan

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, MA, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)

Longfellow Studies: The American Wilderness? How 19th Century American Artists Viewed the Separation Of Civilization and Nature

Grade Level: 9-12 Content Area: Social Studies, Visual & Performing Arts
When European settlers began coming to the wilderness of North America, they did not have a vision that included changing their lifestyle. The plan was to set up self-contained communities where their version of European life could be lived. In the introduction to The Crucible, Arthur Miller even goes as far as saying that the Puritans believed the American forest to be the last stronghold of Satan on this Earth. When Roger Chillingworth shows up in The Scarlet Letter's second chapter, he is welcomed away from life with "the heathen folk" and into "a land where iniquity is searched out, and punished in the sight of rulers and people." In fact, as history's proven, they believed that the continent could be changed to accommodate their interests. Whether their plans were enacted in the name of God, the King, or commerce and economics, the changes always included and still do to this day - the taming of the geographic, human, and animal environments that were here beforehand. It seems that this has always been an issue that polarizes people. Some believe that the landscape should be left intact as much as possible while others believe that the world will inevitably move on in the name of progress for the benefit of mankind. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby a book which many feel is one of the best portrayals of our American reality - the narrator, Nick Carraway, looks upon this progress with cynicism when he ends his narrative by pondering the transformation of "the fresh green breast of a new world" that the initial settlers found on the shores of the continent into a modern society that unsettlingly reminds him of something out of a "night scene by El Greco." Philosophically, the notions of progress, civilization, and scientific advancement are not only entirely subjective, but also rest upon the belief that things are not acceptable as they are. Europeans came here hoping for a better life, and it doesn't seem like we've stopped looking. Again, to quote Fitzgerald, it's the elusive green light and the "orgiastic future" that we've always hoped to find. Our problem has always been our stoic belief system. We cannot seem to find peace in the world either as we've found it or as someone else may have envisioned it. As an example, in Miller's The Crucible, his Judge Danforth says that: "You're either for this court or against this court." He will not allow for alternative perspectives. George W. Bush, in 2002, said that: "You're either for us or against us. There is no middle ground in the war on terror." The frontier -- be it a wilderness of physical, religious, or political nature -- has always frightened Americans. As it's portrayed in the following bits of literature and artwork, the frontier is a doomed place waiting for white, cultured, Europeans to "fix" it. Anything outside of their society is not just different, but unacceptable. The lesson plan included will introduce a few examples of 19th century portrayal of the American forest as a wilderness that people feel needs to be hesitantly looked upon. Fortunately, though, the forest seems to turn no one away. Nature likes all of its creatures, whether or not the favor is returned. While I am not providing actual activities and daily plans, the following information can serve as a rather detailed explanation of things which can combine in any fashion you'd like as a group of lessons.