UMaine’s Page Farm and Home Museum Hosting Traditional Community Picnic July 25
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — As more than 80 Maine farms open their doors to the public for tours on Open Farm Day July 25, the University of Maine’s Page Farm and Home Museum will host a traditional community picnic lunch, featuring old-time games and a home-made ice cream-making demonstration.
This year is the ninth that the Page Museum has offered a companion program celebrating rural Maine farm life and offering the public a taste of the old fashioned, according to Page Farm Director Patricia Henner. The event is free.
“It’s a lot of fun for us,” she says. “We traditionally have a community picnic on Open Farm Day. It’s one of those things we do to promote the program, and so people can reflect on some of the community values that people held in Maine.”
The Page Farm and Home Museum, on the Orono campus, features exhibits, tours, special events and information about agricultural and rural living in Maine between 1865 and 1940.
In addition to games for young and old — horseshoes, bean bag toss, croquet, a three-legged race — the annual picnic also is a time for families “to come see demonstrations of old crafts and to feel involved in the community and meet friends and neighbors and mix fun with education,” Henner says.
The days starts at 11 a.m., rain or shine, with lunch at noon and the ice-cream making (and sampling) demonstration at 1 p.m. While the museum provides free beverages and some desserts, participants are asked to bring a dish to share, a casserole or salad, for instance, Henner says. Additionally, she suggests people bring a lawn chair or blanket.
“If it rains, we’re going to move the picnic indoors, like we did last year,” she says.
Traditionally, between 100 and 150 people attend.
New exhibits and demonstrations at the museum include soap-making, spinning, blacksmithing, canning and videos of life in bygone days, in addition to the new Maine State Grange exhibit, which Henner believes may be the only one in the country, given the secrecy that historically surrounded the Grange.
Standing exhibits include equipment and vehicles for clearing land, harvesting and storing crops and poultry, dairy, 4-H, ice harvesting, a novel gift shop in an old general store setting and a replica of celebrated Maine cook and cookbook author Brownie Schrump’s kitchen.
More information is available by calling the museum at 581-4100 or checking the museum website: http://www.ume.maine.edu/~pfhm.