The "Art and History of Treasure Island" Exhibit

The Fifth Maine Regiment Museum welcomed the first children's exhibit in over a century of operations! The Fifth Maine's education program partnered with the Island Rovers’ Camp at the Peaks Island Children’s Workshop (PICW). This is the third year that PICW has partnered with the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum to produce an island history themed camp.

We are so proud of what the children accomplished in just a few short days that we post their final works here.

How can children today best appreciate museums, history, and the heritage-rich world around them? One approach is to make it relevant to them and to the stories that matter to them.

My approach this year to island history was not only to expose the campers to many artifacts at the museum, historic sites on the island, and the life histories of our elders, but to allow them to express their place in it artistically.
On Monday, they learned that museums were once called “treasure houses” and that artifacts are a form of treasure that takes many forms – sea glass, sea pottery (old crockery), scraps of newspapers and maps, postcards, and so on. Throughout the week they identified what they consider to be treasures on the island. They incorporated some of these treasures in their collages.

The campers first produced a “practice collage” where they learned vocabulary such as “collage,” “focal point,” “composition,” and  “background.” After mastering a practice collage, they produced a final one using sand paper that they created from island sand. They also chose background papers, some of which they created using crayons and pastels, to represent the Fifth Maine’s garden.

Family members who attended the opening asked campers to show them their favorite “treasures” in the museum and were led off by the hand. May this help their childhood memories of museums differ from mine...

Portland Freedom Trail: Sign Posts to the Past

If you've never taken a stroll on the Portland Freedom Trail, then add this outing to your summer to-do list. While the Freedom Trail in Boston features Revolutionary War-era history, Portland's Freedom Trail maps onto the landscape the history of another kind of freedom - freedom from slavery.

Each of the sixteen mapped stops on the trail in downtown Portland pinpoints an important site or person in Maine's chapter of the history of abolitionism and the underground railroad. If the names Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Sojourner Truth sound familiar, you may be surprised to learn that they all visited and lectured publicly in Portland, as well as corresponded with the African American and white abolitionists who lived here. The trail helps Mainers and visitors discover these hidden histories (below).

The artwork of Portland artist, Daniel Minter, crowns each granite marker along the Portland Freedom Trail. The markers provide visitors with signposts to people and places of the past. Minter's designs, transformed into bronze plaques (see right), help us don "time traveler glasses" of sorts. Each plaque depicts scenes and the accompanying text relates the history. As these King Middle School students demonstrate, Minter's plaque designs generate the ideal opportunity for educational rubbings.

I worked with King Middle School this spring as part of the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum's Civil War and Underground Railroad curricular program that kicks off the Sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War. The Abyssinian Church, built in 1829 as Maine's first African American congregation, was one of the sites that we visited on one of our field trips.

As part of their expedition "Small Act of Courage,"students raised money to help support the renovation of this nationally-significant landmark. During their stop at the church, the seventh graders presented their donation to Abyssinian committee members (below).

By taking a stroll on the Freedom Trail, you too can discover some of the hidden chapters in Portland's history and help preserve some of our priceless treasures, such as the Abyssinian Church.