We are excited to announce that the Penobscot Marine Museum has been granted a CARES Act Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will allow us to continue to adapt and expand our educational programming during this challenging time. Our July program series is just the first phase of this project, so watch for more opportunities to engage with our museum, our collections, and our maritime history and culture. Many thanks to NEH for their support.

Starting June 30, we are excited to welcome visitors to our campus. While we won't be open in the same way we have traditionally been, we are thrilled to be able to offer new guided walking tours on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings. These tours will commemorate Maine's bicentennial by focusing on Penobscot Bay's rich maritime history. Tours cost $20/household and will last around 45 minutes. Tours outside of the regular schedule are available daily  for $40/household, and $30  for members. 

 

Participants will have the option of choosing either the standard tour that explores the history of Maine through specific stories relating to Searsport and Penobscot Bay, or the weekly themed tour. Staff-led tours make 7 stops outside buildings throughout our campus, plus allow time for participants to explore boat barns and the "Gone Fishing" exhibit. All ages are welcome and child-friendly tours are available. 

 

Pre-registration is required by 5:00 p.m. the day before the scheduled tour; no walk-ins will be accepted and space is limited. For more information visit our website. To register email at jganskop@pmm-maine.org, or call 207-548-2529, Monday through Wednesday, 8:00 a.m. to noon.

In early March, Penobscot Marine Museum was approached by The Archangel Committee of Greater Portland, Maine to participate in the Matitsa International Forum for Wooden Historical Shipbuilding taking place this July in Arkhangel'sk, Russia. Then COVID-19 made physical travel to Russia impossible, so we switched gears to make a virtual contribution to the conference. The result was a tour of our boat barns and shipbuilding exhibits, filmed, narrated, and edited by our one-woman producer and curator, Cipperly Good. Watch the whole 30 minute tour here .

If you are short on time, or want to focus on a certain type of watercraft, check out these.

9 minute canoe tour

7 ½ minute recreational boat tour

9 ½ minute fishing boat tour

6 minute shipbuilding exhibit tour 

Located in the delta of the Northern Dvina river which flows into the White Sea, Arkhangel'sk was Russia's first trading port with the West, exporting furs, fish, and timber. With the Baltic Sea home to numerous hostile navies of other countries, Peter the Great started the Russian Navy in remote Arkhangel'sk at the turn of the 18th century. The merchant and naval interests spurred shipbuilding in Arkhangel'sk. PMM has few records of Maine ships trading in Arkhangel'sk during the age of sail, as we both exported similar natural resources. The relationship between Portland and Arkhangel'sk began with the building of Liberty Ships at South Portland during World War II to serve in the Arctic Convoy, delivering much needed supplies of food, fuel, medicine, and military supplies to the White Sea region. With the cooling of US and Soviet tensions in the 1980s, the Greater Portland Region and Arkhangelsk became sister cities.

The International Forum for Wooden Historical Shipbuilding's goal is to exchange ideas about the revival and preservation of traditions of historical wooden shipbuilding in the White Sea region of Russia and neighboring Finland, northern Norway and Sweden. Our video of Maine built boats and our shipbuilding traditions subtitled in Russian will be featured alongside presentations by historical museums, shipbuilders, educators, and cultural heritage organizations.

James E. Buttersworth's Ship in Heavy Storm, PMM Collection, 1979.79.16

On June 23, 2020, the National Sailing Hall of Fame inducted marine artist James Edward Buttersworth (1817-1894). He was part of the twelfth class to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, so we can excuse the 126 year lapse between Buttersworth's lifetime and today. Our collection of J.E. Butterworth paintings includes scenes of British and American merchant and naval ships. See our collection of paintings by James, his father Thomas, and brother Thomas in our  virtual exhibit gallery.  

You can read Gary Jobson's biography of James E. Buttersworth at the  National Sailing Hall of Fame site.

In our ongoing effort to put the Eastern  Illustrating & Publishing Collection back together we have our next challenge. An antique dealer in Massachusetts has 266 Eastern glass negatives, and so we ask our supporters once again to help if they are able. We need to raise $6,000 for this effort. This group includes plates from Maine as well as from CT, VT, NH and NY. You can see a list of what's available  here . If you would like to make a donation, towards this purchase, and further purchases of glass plate negatives, you can do so  here . Thank You!!! 

Our work with more than a century of Maine-centered photography seems to attract people who have led (and are in the midst of leading) interesting lives. Eero Ruutila landed in Maine with his wife in October of 2015 after years of moving around the country pursuing work as an agricultural researcher and educator. When he heard that the collected work of Maine photojournalist Kosti Ruohomaa had found its way to PMM, he decided to offer some time here helping with photo digitization projects. We've been very fortunate to have him on our team here since last September; he's focused on processing Maynard Bray's 35mm film. We got him to talk a little bit about his connection to photography and how he wound up finding us. [Excerpted from a longer interview]

PMM: So agriculture's been the backbone of your career. What's the allure of farming for you? Is it partly what drew you to Maine?

ER: My interest in farming probably originated from an early trip to Finland where I experienced the rural homesteads & villages of my grandmother's brothers and sisters during a year-long extended stay in 1967-68. It was a teenager's romantic perception of what I'm sure was actually a hard scrabble existence. Within one generation all of my extended family's small dairy farms were gone. During college I was interested in literature of the natural world, reading the great nature poets of the Sung & T'ang Dynasty, William Blake, Thoreau, Gary Snyder, some of the other Beat writers of the mid-50s. Upon graduation I looked for real experiences where I was in direct contact withNature as inspiration for some sort of artistic expression. It took me 15 years... before I actually landed at a NH farm as its inexperienced farm manager. I stayed [there] for 22 years and learned how to survive, then thrive, as a commercial farmer. My artistic pursuits started to shift to photography as I utilized a 35mm camera to document field work and also to make portraits of my Cambodian farm crew. I came to Maine [when] I was hired to manage Johnny's Selected Seeds 160 acre Research Farm in Albion. 

PMM: Who's your favorite photographer? What do you like about their work? Does it influence yours?

ER: Maybe not my a favorite photographer but definitely favorite photo book of the year is Anastasia Samoylova's FloodZone, her understated vision of the Anthropocene, how sea level rise is silently seeping into coastal neighborhoods in sea level Florida. It is social landscape photography without judgement. It's formatted w/ both color and black and white images. I like her photos of Wild Nature & its inhabitants as uninvited incursion into urbanized environments. Her decisive moments come from these juxtapositions.  Her work probably bears some influence on my own as I am looking for my own narrative about how one cannot cheat biology.

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