Belfast Museum Open for 2020 Season

The Belfast Museum opened for the season on Saturday, June 13.  The featured exhibit this summer is “Becoming Belfast, Maine 1770 -1820.” Other exhibits include maritime history, Capt. Albert W. Stevens, Perry’s Nut House, the William O. Poor apothecary bench, notable Belfast Women, and the 1864 Civil War flag quilt. In the barn are the old two-cell jail from City Hall, a horse-drawn funeral carriage, and old Belfast business signs.The Museum’s website, www.belfastmuseum.org, has been refreshed for the 2020 season with new Belfast history information, online membership, and museum news. This season our visitors are required to wear face coverings and are encouraged to maintain a six-foot social distance. A maximum of five persons will be allowed.The Museum is located at 10 Market Street, corner of Market and Church streets.

 

 

The Belfast Free Library and the Belfast Historical Society and Museum present a Bicentennial Lecture with Liam Riordan Monday, July 6, at 6:30 p.m. The talk will be livestreamed on the Belfast Free Library’s Face Book page from the library’s Abbott Room.

 

Riordan will give an illustrated presentation exploring the long statehood process in Maine that culminated in 1820 with separation from Massachusetts. That struggle engaged a range of challenging public issues that are still recognizable today. Four broad themes that bridge 200 years in telling ways include the “two Maines” and sharp partisan conflict, the explosive place of slavery vis-a-vis the Maine-Missouri Crisis, Wabanaki sovereignty, and the uncertain location and meaning of the international border.

 

Liam Riordan received his bachelor’s degree in history at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Maine since 1997. He is a specialist on the American Revolution — especially the religious, racial and ethnic diversity in the Philadelphia region from 1770 to 1830. He has an ongoing research project about the Loyalists who opposed the American Revolution.

 

Riordan has done considerable public history work to commemorate the bicentennial of the state of Maine in 2019-20 and organized the Maine Bicentennial Conference on the statehood era and its legacy (May 31-June 1, 2019). For more info and related resources, visit https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/me200/.

 

For more information about the presentation, call the Belfast Library at 207-338-3884, ext.10.

 

For more information about the museum and historical society programs, visit their website: www.belfastmuseum.org, info@belfastmuseum.org or call 207 338-9229.