UMaine Folklife Center Brings Boatbuilding, Basketmaking, Greek Cuisine to Folk Festival
Contact: George Manlove at (207) 581-3756
ORONO — Wooden boat building is as immersed in Maine’s cultural heritage as Native American basketmaking, lumbering, potatoes and textiles, although that fact may be lost as Mainers focus on emerging new industries.
Visitors to the National Folk Festival on Bangor’s waterfront park area, however, will have a chance to see and hear all about the historic Maine boat building trade by visiting the University of Maine’s Folklife Center in the folk and traditional arts area tents.
The Folklife Center exhibit will feature boat building discussions, narratives and demonstrations of boats being built by hand on site. Some of Maine’s most prominent boat builders will discuss the building of wood and fiberglass work boats, sailboats, rowboats, canoes, dories, bateaus and even yachts.
Pauleena MacDougall, associate director of the University of Maine’s Maine Folklife Center and faculty associate in anthropology, recently completed a research project on boat building in preparation for the folk festival.
In May and June, she recorded interviews with a half dozen coastal boat builders, discussing technique, philosophy and evolution of the trade. As part of its educational outreach efforts, the center has brought exhibits featuring traditional trades and crafts that are part of Maine’s heritage in each of the last two years of the three-year folk festival. The festival this year is Aug. 27-29.
Since MacDougall’s work involves collecting, preserving and interpreting pieces of Maine history that created its character, culture and traditions, it was natural that boat building was a good topic to research and present, she says.
Boat building is a significant part of Maine history, culture and economy, but the industry also is underappreciated, she says.
“We tend to think of Maine industry as being paper or fishing,” she says. “Traditionally, fishermen made their own boats. It wasn’t particularly glamorous. They had to make a living. Today’s boats are more attractive, but the principles are the same.”
MacDougall says she has been unable to find out precisely how many people are building boats today in Maine, but she estimates as many as 6,000 boatyards exist, mostly along the state’s winding, twisting coastline.
MacDougall and a group of UMaine students who helped with the project will show their interviews in a video presentation, which will augment the demonstrations and exhibits. The presentation includes conversations with boat builders in Brooklin, Maine, a village of fewer than 900 people a few miles south of Blue Hill that boasts itself as the “boat building capital of the world.”
MacDougall says the town, which is home to Wooden Boat magazine, the Wooden Boat School and nearly a dozen boatyards, is representative of a boat building community because of the significance of the craft to its residents.
“Everybody I talked with from that community is either building a boat, had recently finished building a boat or were about to start building a boat,” she says.
The cost of the project was underwritten by an $8,150 grant from the Maine Arts Commission.
“Maine has a good reputation for boat building all over the world,” MacDougall says. “Any yachtsman knows if he’s sailing along the Maine coast and runs into trouble, he can pull into any port and find a good craftsman to fix it. That’s not true in other states.”
Among the more than a dozen boat builders who will be featured in the exhibit include some well-known names: Ralph Stanley of Southwest Harbor, James and Joseph Lowell of Yarmouth, Wade Dow of Brooklin, David Moses Bridges of Perry; Rollin Thurlow of Atkinson, Bill Shamel of Grand Lakes Stream and Eric Dow of Brooklin and his daughter Ariel Dow.
Also, construction of sails, oars, “ships knees,” mast hoops and ditty bags are scheduled to be part of the exhibit.
In addition to boatbuilding, the folk and traditional arts tents, organized by UMaine’s Maine Folklife Center, include the Native American basketmaking exhibit from the Hudson Museum, including demonstrations by long-time basketmaking families from the Penobscot, Micmac and Passamaquoddy tribes, and demonstrations of Greek cooking, with members of Greek communities in Bangor and Millinocket offering samples and recipes.
More information about the folk festival and the Maine Folklife Center is available at the website: http://www.umaine.edu/folklife.