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Culture & Community

(Page 5 of 5) Print Version 

Their sexual abstinence, gender segregation, and withdrawal from the wider society set them apart from the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing America of the 19th century. Their rural self-sufficiency and entrepreneurial spirit often overcame the suspicions of their neighbors as they settled into communities organized around "families" of carefully and ritually controlled members dedicated to a faith of practical purpose — work, charity, utility, self-reliance, and simplicity.

Sisters and girls, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, ca. 1902
Sisters and girls, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, ca. 1902
United Society of Shakers

Maine hosted three Shaker communities with a shared membership of a several hundred. Arriving in Maine early in the 1780s they settled in the somewhat isolated areas of Alfred, Gorham, and Sabbathday Lake (then called Thompson's Pond) at New Gloucester.

Their religious underpinnings and related practices sustained these communities and generally kept them focused on their mission – creating a heaven on earth for the elect.

Believing in a community of goods as well as of souls, Shakers shared all material supplies, lived in group housing, cared for the aged and infirm as part of their service ethic, and offered both security and leadership possibilities to resident Believers.

Nearly all Shaker communities suffered a decline after the Civil War. The Shakers of Alfred turned over their land and buildings to a Christian brotherhood during the early years of the Depression, and moved to New Gloucester to join the remaining members of the Sabbathday Lake community. Sabbathday Lake remains the only active community of Shakers in the country.

Mount Katahdin
Mount Katahdin
Southern Aroostook Agricultural Museum

Culture of Memory

While the Shakers were inveterate record keepers, they also used songs, rituals, and "spirit drawings" to preserve and communicate larger meanings. Native peoples relied heavily on participatory visual –– dances, rituals, sacred colors and patterns – and oral – songs, chants, prayers, and stories --– communications for sustaining their societies and for transmitting their cultural traditions.

The Maine landscape, as well, was more than just a location for material resources, it was also marked by sacred spaces like Mount Katahdin in the interior and petroglyph sites along the coast whose use and meaning have remained culturally significant even if a full understanding eludes scholars.

Organized around villages, clans, and hunting bands, Native Americans also sponsored warrior societies, competitions, communal festivals, and political organizations. Games and other pursuits tested individual abilities and reinforced group traditions. Micmac, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet peoples gambled for sport (one game was played with flat dice, a wooden bowl, and counting sticks for keeping score).

Penobscot Tribal members, Sugarloaf Mountain, 1980
Penobscot Tribal members, Sugarloaf Mountain, 1980
Maine Historical Society

Maine Indians occasionally hosted friendly athletics contests, like lacrosse, amongst neighboring bands designed to showcase skills, such as endurance and accuracy, needed in hunting and war.

Community bonding derived from the small size of native societies, their interdependence, and coherent traditions. For the Wabanaki peoples, maintaining traditions amidst the complications of European settlement, subsequent wars, and near complete marginalization by the United States and the state of Maine necessitated a commitment to identity of heroic proportions.

But it also worked the other way around — native traditions sustained the people, providing a core around which to reconstitute their society, and a cause that committed them to a future more secure than their recent past.

Non-native populations also have relied on oral traditions, along with many other tools, to remember the past and use it for present needs – keeping communities together, enforcing social norms, and coping with changing situations.

Old Home Days celebrations work to preserve a community's sense of community and repackage the past, not only as nostalgia, but also as a useable base for the future. Monuments and statues to soldiers, to heroes and heroines, and, sometimes, to ordinary citizens who are emblematic of the community also frame past experiences for current and future generations.

Old Home Week, Houlton, 1907
Old Home Week, Houlton, 1907
Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum

The monuments, and often parades on patriotic holidays, help to steer historical memory to particular narratives that can serve to set limits on a community's identity and the behavior of individuals within it.

Memory is preserved in many other ways as well – written and visual accounts, lectures, movies, activities of historical societies, and many more. The cultural, religious, social, and educational institutions Mainers form all contribute in various ways to the construction of memory as well as to community.


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Exhibits

Hiking, Art & Science: Portland's White Mountain Club

Hiking, Art & Science: Portland's White Mountain Club

Members of Portland's White Mountain Club, formed in 1873, hiked, sketched, and recorded scientific information. Some accounts of their adventures are humorous.

Le Théâtre

Le Théâtre

Lewiston, Maine's second largest city, was long looked upon by many as a mill town with grimy smoke stacks, crowded tenements, low-paying jobs, sleazy clubs and little by way of refinement, except for Bates College. Yet, a noted Québec historian, Robert Rumilly, described it as "the French Athens of New England."

Strike Up the Band

Strike Up the Band

Before the era of recorded music and radio, nearly every community had a band that played at parades and other civic events. Fire departments had bands, military units had bands, theaters had bands. Band music was everywhere.

Longfellow: The Man Who Invented America

Longfellow: The Man Who Invented America

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a man and a poet of New England conscience. He was influenced by his ancestry and his Portland boyhood home and experience.

Independence and Challenges: The Life of Hannah Pierce

Independence and Challenges: The Life of Hannah Pierce

Hannah Pierce (1788-1873) of West Baldwin, who remained single, operated the family farm, invested in various enterprises, and forged a life closely connected to her siblings and their children.

Lillian Nordica: Farmington Diva

Lillian Nordica: Farmington Diva

Lillian Norton, known as Nordica, was one of the best known sopranos in America and the world at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She was a native of Farmington.

People, Pets & Portraits

People, Pets & Portraits

Informal family photos often include family pets -- but formal, studio portraits and paintings also often feature one person and one pet, in formal attire and pose.

A City Awakes: Arts and Artisans of Portland

A City Awakes: Arts and Artisans of Portland

Portland's growth from 1786 to 1860 spawned a unique social and cultural environment and fostered artistic opportunity and creative expression in a broad range of the arts, which flowered with the increasing wealth and opportunity in the city.

May Baskets, A Dog, and a Party for Children

May Baskets, A Dog, and a Party for Children

Two Biddeford Pool women, hearing what sounded like an intruder at their door one spring night, let the dog out to chase whoever was there. Later, they found out what really happened at their door -- and made amends.

The Kotzschmar Memorial Organ

The Kotzschmar Memorial Organ

A fire and two men whose lives were entwined for more than 50 years resulted in what is now considered to be "the Jewel of Portland" -- the Austin organ that was given to the city of Portland in 1912.

A Parade, An Airplane and Two Weddings

A Parade, An Airplane and Two Weddings

Two couples, a parade from downtown Caribou to the airfield, and two airplane flights were the scene in 1930 when the couples each took off in a single-engine plane to tie the knot high over Aroostook County.

Bibliography/Further Reading





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