[The following is my Historical Site Critical Analysis for History 122, a class I’m currently enrolled in at the University of Southern Maine. My choice of a site was Augusta’s Maine State Museum. I visited the site on Saturday, March 23, 2019. –jb]

The Maine State Museum in Augusta is one of the oldest state-funded museums in the U.S. The state’s allocation to maintain the museum as recently as 2014 was $1.7 million, which covers 80 percent of the museum’s operating budget. However, this amount is miniscule compared to say a state museum like the New York State Museum, which receives more than $20 million in state-directed funds.

From a document I located online prepared for the Maine State Legislature in 2015, the museum’s chief purpose as a museum and center for learning is to be “the state’s chief institution for presenting and sharing the cultural and natural heritage of Maine, especially in relation to the use of authentic objects.”

I chose to visit the museum on Saturday, March 23, because I’d learned that a new exhibit would be opening that day. Women’s Long Road—100 Years to the Vote, commenced the morning I visited. This, along with the Maine + Jewish: Two Centuries, were two of the museum’s rotating exhibits that change during the year. Both represented elements of 19^th century American history, so they would be perfect for fulfilling requirements of this critical analysis.

Both of these “new” exhibits were hosted in large “rooms” on the 4^th floor of the museum. The museum occupies a portion of a large structure known as the Cultural Building that also houses the Maine State Library (on the basement level), and the Maine State Archives.

The Maine State Museum is a self-directed museum. As someone who hasn’t visited the museum in more than a decade, I found access and direction to be confusing. I considered the signage upon entry to be lacking. For instance, I had to ask where the exhibit on women’s suffrage was before being directed to the fourth floor, where there were posters on the wall. The Jewish exhibit was also on the museum’s 4^th floor.

Reading the text placards around the room of the Women’s Long Road exhibit was interesting. The material was well-presented in the form of historically-oriented placards. For instance, I learned that Maine’s first constitution in 1820, answered the question on “who should vote?” It was strictly for men. According to the placard, the U.S. Constitution had left this privilege up to the states. It would be another 100 years before women in Maine has the right to vote.

From our class reading and discussions, my assessment would be that the exhibit did a good job of highlighting elements that we’d talked about: for instance, many of the “movers and shakers” in Maine’s push for women’s right to vote were white women of privilege and means. This was born out from the various photographs, artifacts, and a generous sampling of documents displayed. I liked how Maine’s story was juxtaposed with similar national artifacts showing the parallel track of Maine’s effort with what was taking place across the country.

Not knowing much about Maine’s Jewish community, I learned that Jewish immigrants settled in Portland and Bangor in the early-1800s. I also learned that in Portland and Bath that there were attempts to convert Jews to Christianity in the 1840s.

Like the women’s suffrage exhibit, the Maine + Jewish exhibit utilized a substantial room, with photos, placards, and other artifacts strategically-placed, to take visitors around the space in an organized manner. I think the photos and captions helped pull me towards certain elements. I’m guessing it would be similar for most others who visited the museum.

One particular exhibit I enjoyed was about a man named Jacob Etcowitz who was called “The Potato King of Maine.” Etcowitz’s father, Louis, settled in Fort Kent, at the northern tip of the state, in 1803. No one knows for sure why the family chose a location a good five hours (today) from Portland. The museum had a short video created by the great-grandson of Etcowitz.

The Potato King of Maine from The Forward on Vimeo.

Josh Nathan-Kazis is a writer for The Forward (formerly, the Jewish Daily Forward) and he’d traveled north to Fort Kent to find out about his relative. His video, which he narrated was fascinating. It was also one of several ways that the museum has incorporated technology and video into telling the story of the past. I think this is a nice touch, given that the museum does cater to school groups and youth, a key demographic among its visitor groups. Videos could be accessed via iPads.

As an adult, Jake Etcowitz built a potato business, a garage, he sold cars, he owned parts of the telephone company and movie theater: he was truly an entrepreneur. Nathan-Kazis highlights how Jake always wore a three-piece suit, like he was conducting business in the midst of a large urban area, like New York City. Nathan-Kazis details the importance of Jake’s Jewish heritage and religious faith. Apparently, Jake had even built a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, in his house.

There were a number of ongoing exhibits that I found somewhat troubling.

The At Home in Maine exhibit, which purports to “tell stories of Mainers at home throughout history, formed an odd counter-balance to the women’s suffrage exhibit. I don’t think that was its intent. This was done (from my perspective), by portraying women—especially in photographs—doing “women’s work”: hanging clothes, cleaning the house, and other domestic work. This juxtaposition was very obvious to me and I think it would have been to anyone sensitive to issues of gender and women’s rights.

Interestingly, this exhibit received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and according to online documents, it is the largest single, private and federally funded exhibit ever opened at the museum, as of 2015. This is one of the museum’s central exhibits, with the women’s exhibit and Jewish exhibit comprising exhibits that rotate throughout the year.

Tucked in the basement of the museum, in a way that felt like an afterthought to me, the visitor, was the exhibit on Maine’s indigenous population, referred to as the Paleo-Indians. This was part of an exhibit called, 12,000 Years in Maine.

The placard text accompanying one of several indigenous dioramas had four short paragraphs about the Paleo-Indians. The visitor would learn that Paleo-Indians lived 9,500 to 11,000 years ago in the Magalloway River Valley (known by that designation in “Paleo-Indian times”), which would be in what we know today as the Western Maine region, probably near Rangeley Lake. I was left wanting to know much more about this population and what happened to them? They’d been “replaced” by a truncated version, masquerading as “history.”

Having read O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting, I was able to see how this exhibit fit very well into what she described perfectly in this passage from her book:

“Their accounts of the past, present, and future entailed a process of replacing Indians physically and imaginatively on the landscape of New England. That is, they formulated a history that negated previous Indian history as a “dead end” (literally) and substituted Indian history with a glorious New England history of just relations and property transactions rooted in American diplomacy that legitimated their claims to Indian homeland, and to the institution they grounded there.” (p. 189)

Like the Paleo-Indian exhibit, I also found another area that seemed to present countervailing ideas on another topic: labor.

The museum hosts the Maine Labor Mural. This 36-foot-wide, 11-panel mural, landed in the center of a firestorm initiated by Maine’s former governor, Paul LePage. He saw it as a portrayal of Maine’s workers in a light he didn’t like. The entire shitstorm was typical for this governor, a regional version of Trump, and how history can get caught in the middle of an ideological maelstrom.

The mural, which had been displayed at Maine’s Department of Labor’s offices, includes scenes of Maine workers, including shoemakers, a “Rosie the Riveter” in a shipyard, as well as elements of the 1986 paper mill strike in Jay, Maine that got national coverage and split a community in two. LePage and his lackeys deemed these scenes as “too one-sided in favor of unions.” History is “tricky,” that way.

The fact that it now resides in the atrium upon entering the Cultural Building that hosts the museum, library, and state archives, is a good thing, in my opinion. I was pleased when it was placed there a couple of years ago, after being put away in storage for more than a year. The artist who was commissioned to do the mural, Judy Taylor, did a wonderful job. I never grow tired of looking at it and I’ve stood in front of it numerous times, especially during the latter part of my time doing workforce development, when I’d pass through Augusta regularly, and was a weekly visitor to the building during trips to the Maine State Library.

Once more, while “rooting around the basement” of the museum, I found the Made in Maine exhibit. Papermaking was represented, mainly via an old film funded by the Maine Seaboard Paper Company of Bucksport.

The film, which was done for marketing purposes in 1940, will be viewed by all but a few people as a “nice” nostalgia piece, and an ode to the “good ole’ days” when papermaking was abundant up and down Maine’s waterways and rivers.

While the labor mural recognizes the labor strife of Maine’s past, this papermaking sidebar doesn’t show any of it, or the dangers inherent in logging, let alone the physical demands of this work. Instead, it portrays the paper mill as a benevolent “father,” kindly caring for its workers.

Perhaps I’m more sensitive to this than most having grown up in a papermaking family, as well as recently researching and writing about the closure of the former Maine Seaboard Paper Company, and how it’s affected the community.

As a museum, representing Maine, the Maine State Museum tells part of the state’s story, but only part of it. This might be due to the challenges inherent with funding cultural elements that are considered social infrastructure. I do consider our state fortunate that there is a place that gets school kids interested in the past.

What I came away with, as someone who has been fascinated by history for a long time, is that my own perspective and orientation has been shifted by your class. I think I’m able to look at things more critically now than ever before, especially relative to the heritage of the American Indian. I know I wouldn’t have “seen” the Paleo-Indian exhibit in the same way prior to being exposed to O’Brien’s book and the other discussions we’ve had.