Museum Focus: 19th Century Willowbrook Village
A New Era of Interest, Visitation, and Utilization at 19th Century Willowbrook Village
By Robert Schmick, Museum Director, 19th Century Willowbrook Villlage
19th Century Willowbrook Village in Newfield, Maine has long presented both artifacts and buildings from New England’s rural past. Recently, the museum has shifted greater attention to education with new offerings informed by a new mission that emphasizes living history, traditional arts instruction, and hands-on programming that makes use of a working collection. History museums like Willowbrook have the opportunity to offer educational experiences with not only history but the past’s connection to our present science and technology. The goal is to become more relevant to current objectives in education and a place beyond the conventional classroom where learning by doing can take place. We are optimistic that providing new experiences at the museum will result in a new era of interest, visitation, and utilization.
In order to survive, the museum has to become more than just a one day a year field trip. We believe it can be a community resource for lifelong learning. Serving students on class field trips has been a significant part of what the museum has done, but numbers have declined in recent years. This could be attributed to a number of factors: transportation cost, reduced budgets, and more choices for field trips. Our approach is to create programming that serves the specific needs of the curriculum; the hands-on experiences we provide may be as simple as working a block and tackle and as difficult as building a crystal radio set from scratch but in such a setting, such experiences will have a lasting power that other experiences don’t. As we all know, we remember much about that 4th grade field trip we took but little about the other 179 days of that or any given school year.
This year the numbers have increased significantly with new offerings. We will have over 2,000 visiting on class field trips by October 17; this is a first time for field trips in October and November. For the sake of full disclosure, this is the first year that the museum has allowed school groups to ride its 1894 horse carousel. Teachers were immensely pleased with this news, and this went a long way to getting school groups to come back this season. For years students and teachers were led up to a barrier where they watched the carousel function. The carousel has immense educational value, as it still functions through the use of its original steam engine although the coal boiler has been bypassed and compressed air is its power source. We plan on creating a hands-on experiences with the mechanics of such a machine in the future through funds provided by a National Carousel Association grant; a miniature version of the engine will provide a working example of steam power.
In addition to riding the carousel, a Davis Family Foundation grant made possible the re-modeling of an existing structure formerly devoted exclusively to static display. The new Hands-On History building includes experiences with electro magnets; there are working hand-crank telephones, magnetos wired to light fixtures, an activity with metal filings and magnets, and two rooms at opposite ends of the building that present re- creations of the R.M.S. Titanic and R.M.S. Carpathia Marconi radio rooms with a dozen working telegraph keys and sounders.
Learning Morse Code
Visitors practice sending and receiving “S-O-S” and other simple words in the Marconi radio rooms, while also discovering obvious connections between the language of text messaging and online communication with that of the forgotten language of the “Victorian Internet”. These rooms are filled with props representing early radio technology, including spark gaps, knob and tube wiring, voltage regulators, hand switches, and the like. These props are on long term loan from the Lyric Theater of Burlington, VT and were created for a musical version of Titanic. A duplicate set was created for the Carpathia radio room by our staff. Our early telephones were made operable by curator Dave Thompson of the Telephone Museum in Ellsworth. Erector sets are also made available for extended hands-on learning activity in this space.
The hands-on offerings are complemented by an exhibit of early Maine-made vacuum tube and crystal set radios on display with a sampling of mainstream 1920-1930s radios, including models from New Hampshire radio pioneer Atwater Kent. Twelve homemade crystal radios are grounded and connected to hundreds of feet of wire antennae. Although finished in time for school groups this season after a winter of construction, we were soon overwhelmed by the labor intensive problem of sanitizing each ear phone after use to the point of having to close the activity. We will set up miniature speakers so our budding radio operators can tune into AM radio next season. We have an AM transmitter set up for telecasting recorded vintage radio as Newfield’s geography is a portal to the past in every sense since cell phones and radio reception is almost non-existent.
Hands-On Measuring and Mixing in the Victorian Kitchen
We have also brought life to a Victorian kitchen scenario with installation of a working period stove, cast iron sink, ice box and a hand crank washing machine and mangle; there has been regular butter and corn bread making as well as laundry done by the basket. We plan to make our own corn meal flour from 200 ears of sweet corn we recently hanged to dry for later processing with our 1870s grist mill.
A second working blacksmith shop has gone up this season (moved from Lincolnville, ME), so we now have indoor space for eight blacksmithing students. We have had ongoing classes in knife and hardware making. An eight foot, mid 19th century cider press and grinder has been restored to operating condition, and will be a hands-on learning activity. Two horse treadmills and two dog treadmills have been made functional for climb aboard and power scenarios; the museum will continue to create these types of tactile/kinesthetic activities to accompany existing static displays.
The museum has received two other grants this season, including an Infrastructure Grant from the Maine Humanities Council to create a summer silent film festival and a traveling re-creation of a 1920s silent movie palace that will remain at the museum during its season and then go to other museums like Bangor’s Discovery Museum in the fall. The “palace” will be constructed of wooden boxes with a trompe d’oeil exterior recreating a street view of Portland’s first movie cinema Dreamland with a Byzantine architecture motif interior typical of the era.
The third grant from the Narragansett Number One Foundation has provided matching funds for a working cider mill. An existing building has been adapted for the cider mill and a new concrete floor with drainage has been installed. The creation of new mortise and tenon timbers for the 19th century, Waterville, Maine–made, twin screw press occurred this winter; the timbers were assembled in recent weeks. A similar vintage flat belt pulley driven macerator was also completely refurbished for eventual use. The macerator restoration included fabrication of a new stainless steel sheathing with serrated teeth for the wooden crushing drum. The museum has invited the public to bring apples and containers to make their own cider this fall. The macerator will be belt- powered by visitors on a horse treadmill. The museum has received a large donation of early equipment, tools and materials from Meriden, Connecticut for the purpose of a new machinist shop scenario. The space and equipment will be used by a select group who will provide living history while doing fabrications; the shop will also serve as the back drop for hands-on experiences with simple machine building, sheet metal fabrication, and erector set assembly by younger visitors.
