Organization celebrates 'Ways of the Woods'
'Museum on Wheels' comes to remote Northeast Kingdom town
|
|
Mike Wilson, senior program director for the Northern Forest Center, stands in front of the Ways of the Woods exhibit. Carla Occaso |
Toolbox
By CARLA OCCASO Staff Writer - Published: September 10, 2006
BROWNINGTON – Rows of towering ancient maples line the town's remote dirt Old Stone House Road creating a cool green canopy on a recent hot late-summer day.
It is a fitting but unexpected place to find a high-tech museum exhibit concerning life, people and culture of the northern forest.
Mike Wilson, senior program manager, says he is happy to have only a few visitors at a time at the traveling exhibit he spent years helping to create, because even these small numbers help bring attention to the remote Northeast Kingdom town of Brownington which is steeped in history and culture.
"We help promote small heritage-based institutions. This is a nice example of a gem of a museum," he said of the Old Stone House museum. The museum is centered in the stone building called Athenian Hall built in the 1800s by Alexander Twilight, Vermont's first black educator, using stones he quarried himself.
Brownington, located just north of Barton, has a population of 555, and is the latest stop of the roving museum exhibit designed by the Boston firm of Krent, Paffett and Carney. Housed in a 53-foot-long, air-conditioned tractor trailer, the museum contains a high-tech, multi-media presentation of people, communities, stories, music and products from the northern forests of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and northern New York.
Chimes sound as you walk in, or perhaps you hear an old logging chanty sung in a grizzled voice.
Undulating walls display larger-than-life historic black-and-white photo reproductions. Two displays show rural crafts behind glass next to computerized videos of northern woods inhabitants, like Sue Herne, an Akwesasne Mohawk living in northern New York by the St. Lawrence River.
Herne speaks of the importance of living with nature and keeping in touch with the past.
"The past was a more perfect time," Herne says in the video. "We need to look to the past."
Herne noted how when she was a child the rivers were a prominent part of the landscape and the community. Rivers served as a source of transportation and food.
"When I was a little girl everybody ate fish. It was during my lifetime we learned how polluted our waters are," Herne said. "The landscape is a positive part of who we are. One of our struggles is learning how to cope with the contamination."
The Akwesasne Mohawks struggle with fitting in with modern times, especially since "our philosophy is to look ahead the next seven generations and the environment is a big part of it," Herne said.
Others depicted in the videos shared different northern experiences, like Brendan Whittaker, a forester, farmer and minister living in Essex County, Vt.
"Woodpiles are not luxuries, they are necessities," Whittaker said in the video, noting the rural Vermont economy is based on the natural realm.
And Nance Harrison of Colebrook, N.H., describes how she pieces her livelihood together with a mishmash of jobs. Harrison teaches at the local schools, raises sheep, spins wool, knits, sells her handicrafts at farmers markets and produces pies to sell.
"I'm self-employed to the max," she says in the video.
Several visitors, like Tom and Nadine Bosley of Thomasville, Pa., were most captivated by an elaborately engineered nature-meets-history-meets-technology display featuring a 120-year old white pine stump and infrared laser rays. This infrared interactive media display called the "Rings of Time" allows visitors to pass a hand under a sensor, which triggers a multi-media projection including music, song, a graphic quotation and historic photo montage projection. Wilson likens it to the photographic style of a Ken Burns (Civil War) documentary.
Nadine Bosley said she liked to see "the way things were done in the past."
She also liked to read the quotations from "folks of the time gone by."
Wilson said the purpose of the exhibit is to create opportunities offered by the shared forest-based culture. He also said the exhibit encourages people to look for opportunities to work with others to respond to the economy and the community.
"The northern forest is one of America's most important and rapidly changing forest regions. It would be easy to let what is special about the region slip away as we work to address current challenges and build a vibrant future," said Steve Blackmer, president of the Northern Forest Center. "Ways of the Woods will remind people that tradition and innovation not only can coexist, but also can thrive together- as they have for generations in the Northern Forest."
A $300,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant and additional matching funds funded "Ways of the Woods," Wilson said. The idea is to build "long-term economy" using sustainable forest products and heritage- and nature-based tourism.
The exhibit is in Brownington through today, and then moves on to the Bethel Harvest Festival on Sept. 16, then to Mexico, Maine, Sept. 18-20. It will be back in Berlin, N.H., Oct. 16-18 after touring Maine.
71