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Model Pumpkin Boat Competition
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1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
$5 registration fee
PMM Crescent
The model boats in Penobscot Marine Museum's temporary exhibit, "Sailing Small: Small Boats, Big Ideas" are made of many different materials from paper to plastic. As part of Searsport's Fling into fall, we challenge you to make a model boat out of a Pumpkin! Bring your model pumpkin boat to the Penobscot Marine Museum on Saturday October 6th to compete. PMM staff will judge entries using a point system based on size, composition, creative use of pumpkin, overall look, ability to float, and speed. The winner will receive 50% of the proceeds and the other 50% will go to the Penobscot Marine Museum to help support programming like this!
Rules & Regulations
- A member of the gourd family (pumpkin, squash, cucumber, zucchini, melon, etc.) must be a key component of the model boat
- Must float
- Must be able to move from A to B without human contact (all boats will be timed to travel across our small pool)
- Must be under 12" tall by 12" wide by 12" deep
- Must pre-register by October 3rd
- All boats must arrive before 1pm on Saturday, October 6th. Judging begins at 1pm.
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PMM seeks two paid interns, who are enrolled students in high school or an institution of higher education. The project is to catalog and rehouse our extensive nautical chart collection. The internship will require a student worker to devote two hours a week for ten weeks, during normal business hours Monday through Friday
,
9am to 5pm.
The ideal candidates will be able to lift large folders of charts, yet have the finesse to deal with delicate paper, and enter data into a computer database. The internship will begin as soon as position is filled. If interested, please contact Cipperly Good at
[email protected]
or 207-548-2529x 212.
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It's a pleasure to have this monthly opportunity for a shout-out to our terrific crew of volunteers. Taking a bow this month is Erin Tokarz, who became a powerful addition to our ranks less than a year ago. Her talents are perfectly suited to the wheelhouse of PMM's Photo Archives-she's an artist with technical aptitude.
She's led an unusual life to boot. She's been a photographer since she was old enough to vote, and went to art school to focus on fine art photography for a while as her younger self before meeting her future husband Aaron and beginning a series of geographical adventures. They lived on his boat for eight months, then rambled through Mexico and Guatemala together for a time.
The pair returned to the states only when Erin was ready to give birth to their first child; they made their way to Arkansas, where Aaron's mother lived (she was a midwife). Aaron is a boat builder, and has long preferred to be an itinerant one, so the young, slowly growing family moved around a lot. Erin spent much of this time homeschooling their children, who have all turned out to be pretty successful people. Eventually, they established a fixed point on the map when they built a house on some land gifted to them by friends in Ohio. While they still maintain the Ohio residence as a base of sorts, they have continued to change addresses as Aaron finds interesting projects to align himself with in different places.
Erin got her chance to return to her study of photography after the pair moved to Rockland with their youngest daughter in 2015. She enrolled in the professional certificate program at Maine Media workshops, where she specialized in visual storytelling. This training helped her refine her artistic vision and stoked her creative fires.
The family has continued living in Rockland; Erin found us last November, and her skills have been a boon to PMM. She generously spends six hours a week on archival digital camera capture of a large group of 35mm negatives belonging to the National Fisherman Collection; we're very grateful to have her assistance in finishing this important and lengthy project. We hope to have her on board in the same role when we begin processing the much-publicized Kosti Ruohomaa Collection, which came to the museum last year.
Erin is a thoroughly obsessed photographer; when she's not here, she's building her freelance portrait business, making pinhole cameras, and scheming her next foray into alternative-process printmaking. We are indeed lucky to know her and work with her. Erin, thanks for making your mark here.
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Thank you to everyone who made our
2018 Gala & Auction a success!
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Pictured L to R: Judy Stein,
Gala Co-Chair; Stephen Tall, PMM President; Derry Henderson, PMM
Vice President of Operations; Rick Wellman, PMM Treasurer
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Ed Coffin Collection Goes Online!
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LB2013.21.412
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Ed Coffin was a native of Nantucket, who moved to Owls Head, Maine, shortly after World War II. During his almost 70 years in mid-coast Maine, and with an intense interest in maritime history as well as an extroverted personality, he absorbed a great deal by conversations with old-timers while at the same time amassing thousands of historic photographs of local boats, boatbuilding, industry, and waterfront scenes. In addition to
collecting the photographs, Coffin also
researched the images, identifying dates, boat names and types, cities
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LB2013.21.213
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and towns, and people, creating an invaluable resource. Geographically, the photographs cover Boothbay to the south and Stockton Springs to the north, as well as the islands of the Penobscot Bay. The subjects include schooners and other sailing ships, fishing vessels, people, granite, fishing and boatbuilding industries, as well as general coastal and town views. The Penobscot Marine Museum was thrilled when Ed decided to entrust this treasure to their care in 2013. The
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LB2013.21.160
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collection has been digitized (primarily by Ken Gordon) and and cataloged (by Alan Gray) over the past 5 years and we are excited to share it in its entiretywith the world. Sadly, Ed passed away in May of this year and while he won't get to see his collection on the world wide web, we are sure he would be pleased that so many would get a chance to see it.
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Our photo intern for NEXT summer
has already started contributing!
Kevin Anacker a media and informational services student from Germany will be attending the University of Mane next fall and has already secured an internship position here at PMM starting in June of 2019. He discovered a historical map of Maine in his local museum's archive and did a little research on it and shared it with us. Hopefully a sign of many good things to come from him!
The Story of a Map
Today, it's all about maps, more specifically about historical maps and how they find their way into the world through beautiful coincidences.
Nowadays, you can find maps in many facets of your everyday life and they are, therefore, well known.
When one is in an archive and works with maps, one usually speaks of historical geography, which is a subarea of geography. Historical geography is the study of area in where the events of the past took place. Thus, the area is recorded, where human actions are as were recognizable, for example, the establishment of a settlement. Likewise, the cause is examined, why e.g. a settlement was built. In other words, you look at how the environment is related to the people, taking into account the historical circumstances.
Considering the map shown, I would like to refer to its spiritual creator J. Calvin Smith (1829-1855). Smith was an American engraver, spending most of his life in New York City. But travelling also gave him great pleasure.
His maps, which he constructed in cooperation with his partner George Sherman, were mostly made for government agencies, including, for example, the Army Corps, where his maps were used in the United States Exploring Expedition. This mission began in 1838 and was set to explore the Pacific. In 1842, the mission was declared successful. It contributed significantly to the natural sciences in the United States of America.
During a trip abroad, the German Theodor Fischer (1862 - 1938), who himself was a city planner and architect, found this beautiful map of Maine in a New York antiquarian bookshop, he asked for permission to take this map, which exists in duplicate, to take Germany and have it printed there. The shop owner liked this idea so much that he gave Theodor Fischer a short hand of 16 maps from the United States owned by map publisher John Disturnell (1801 - 1877), who worked closely with J. Calvin Smith until his death in 1855.
After Fischer's death, his printing works and the maps arrived at the archive.
By this, a map from the United States got to a Germany archive on in an unusual way. This is a nice example to show how archives get interesting material. Therefore, the following sentence applies: An archive is like a big treasure chest. One always finds something, which one did not expect to find.
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A Long Look Back
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Pictured L to R: Dave Lowell;
Gene Dalrymple; Matt Wheeler, PMM Photo Archives |
Gene Dalrymple would probably not be considered a native bysome people's reckoning, but his 97-year association with Marshall Point in Port Clyde, Maine, makes him a local by ours. Dalrymple grew up outside of Boston, but his maternal grandfather was the last keeper at Marshall Point Light during the US Lighthouse Service era; his tenure there (July 1874 to May 1919) was the longest in the history of the Service. Dalrymple's mother was born in the lighthouse; his family were at home when the original mortared stone keeper's house was struck by lightning in 1895 (there were no casualties but the building itself, which had to be replaced).
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Our new PMM branded hats are available for $14.99 in our Museum Store. Stop by today and get yours!
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