Winter Lecture Series 2021
Due to the global pandemic, lectures were presented virtually.
- Pioneers of Merrymeeting Bay with Dr. Bruce Bourque, Fred Koerber, and Dr. Alan Bowes
It is little known that the English settlement around Merrymeeting Bay began about the same time Puritans arrived in Boston. Between then and 1675, a substantial community emerged but was wiped out during King Philip’s War. The history of this lost community is poorly understood and none of its early home sites has ever been located or explored archaeologically. The Merrymeeting Bay Pioneers Project aims to identify these pioneers and to locate and explore their homesteads. - The Great Turnout of 1841: Factory Girls and Maine’s First Labor Strike with Elizabeth DeWolfe
In 1841, nearly 500 female factory workers walked out of Saco’s York Manufacturing Company and paraded up Main Street, chanting and singing. They gathered in a local church, formed a committee, and sent the factory owner a document articulating their complaints about wages, housing, and paternalistic rules. In this illustrated talk, we’ll explore the life of New England “factory girls,” and the opportunities and challenges millwork brought. We’ll examine the tense days that followed the “turn-out” and see how a strike in one Maine town connected to national agitation for women’s rights, including suffrage. - The Silent Bicentennial with Herb Adams
COVID-19 burst Maine’s Bicentennial (2020) like it was a battered balloon, but the boisterous years to Statehood (1820) and The Maine Centennial (1920) were anything but a bust. The story will be told in 2 parts: “To Make the Angels Weep! Maine’s Struggle for Statehood, 1820,” the true backstory of Kings and slavery, bad math and bad politics, defiance, and backroom deals that made Maine the 23rd State, and “The Big Parade—Centennial, 1920!” Maine’s biggest birthday bash ever included biplanes, submarines, silent movies, native encampments, cavalry charges, booming parades, and the governor in a canoe in Deering Oaks in Portland.