UNE students create Saco Museum exhibition on the great age of sail
A University of New England history class and the Saco Museum teamed up this spring to create an exhibition on the great age of sail in Maine, which will be on view at the museum through Sept. 4, 2011.
The exhibition, titled "Voyages and the Great Age of Sail," is the product of a UNE Department of History course, which was team-taught by Professor Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, Ph.D., chair of the UNE Department of History, and Saco Museum Education and Program Manager Camille Smalley.
The Maine Humanities Council awarded UNE a $4,300 grant for the spring 2011 course.
Saco Sea Captain
Tristram Jordan
The course has used the experiences of a Saco sea captain, Tristram Jordan, as a window into nineteenth-century maritime history. Students have studied the letters of Captain Jordan and his wife, Catherine, as a way to understand Saco and Biddeford's role in this important period of New England history.
Jordan, at sea in the trans-Atlantic trade for months at a time, wrote long letters capturing both the excitement of the sea and of the time he could return to land and simply farm. Catherine, at home in Saco, wrote to her distant husband of her struggles raising their children, running a household, and managing the family farm and business interests.
The Jordans' story is filled with the excitement and the dangers of life at sea and the challenges for the family left behind at home. Captain Jordan's life, and that of his son Frederic, both come to tragic ends at sea. As students learn the Jordans' story, they have been exploring the local, regional and national issues that made this period so important in maritime history, connecting a local story to national, and indeed global, trends.
The Exhibit
The major project of this course was for students to design a museum exhibit to share the Jordans' story with the public. As a hands-on history course, students decided each facet of the exhibition including which elements of the story to tell, what background historical information to provide, and which artifacts to display.
Students tackled design issues such as the lay out of the exhibit, the wall colors and look of the exhibit, and accessibility to diverse audiences. Students in this class learned both the content of an important period in American history as well as how historians make important choices in the stories they tell, both in writing and visuals.
Elizabeth De Wolfe and Camille Smalley
De Wolfe's most recent book is Domestic Broils: Shakers, Antebellum Marriage, and the Narratives of Mary and Joseph Dyer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Her first study of the anti-Shaker activist Mary Marshall Dyer, Shaking the Faith: Women, Family and Mary Marshall Dyer's Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867, received the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the Communal Studies Association.
Her 2007 book on Saco factory girl Berengera Caswell, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories, received book awards from the New England Historical Association, the Northeast Popular Culture Association, the Independent Publishers Association, and ForeWord Magazine.
The Saco Museum's Smalley graduated from UNE in 2008 with a major in English and a minor in women's studies. She went on to receive a master's degree in American and New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine.
During her course work at UNE, Smalley participated in De Wolfe's first team-taught course with the Saco Museum in 2007-2008. As part of the course, Smalley and the other students in the class created an exhibition at the Saco Museum on the circumstances and historical context of the incidents of De Wolfe's book The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories.
The exhibition, which opened May 6th, will be on view at the Saco Museum through Sept, 4th. The Museum is located at 371 Main St., Saco.