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BETHEL — The first event in the “Bethel250” program series in honor of the 250th anniversary of the town’s establishment in 1768 will take place at 1:30 p.m., Saturday, March 31, at the Bethel Inn, when Rebecca White will speak about “Women’s Activism at the University of Maine from the 1940s through the 1960s.”
The 2018 Women’s History Month program is free and open to the public.
White holds a doctorate in history, specializing in women’s history and gender studies. Her dissertation examined the social history of mothers’ allowances in Maine and New Brunswick, with particular emphasis on the power structures and ideological basis of these state welfare programs and ways that women, families and communities worked within these rigid systems to maintain their families and assert some level of independence. These same themes of gender, authority, and power infuse her teaching in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Maine.
Museums of the Bethel Historical Society will open its 2018 season with three new exhibits at the Robinson House Tuesday, May 29. “White Mountain National Forest: The Centennial Exhibition” will occupy a first-floor gallery near the museum shop. Visitors will learn how the forested highlands of northern New Hampshire and western Maine came to be appreciated by millions for their scenic and health-giving qualities, only to be devastated by uncontrolled commercial logging in the final decades of the 19th century. The story of how a large portion of the White Mountain region of Maine and New Hampshire was eventually saved and set aside in 1918 for the public’s benefit will be told through paintings, historic photos, vintage artifacts and moving images.
Included in the display will be a section titled “Hastings, Maine: The Rise and Fall of a White Mountain Lumbering Village.” Several rare photos of Hastings and its short-lived logging railroad are being loaned for the exhibit by the Gilead Historical Society.
In conjunction with the White Mountain National Forest exhibition, a special art show and sale featuring landscapes by nationally-recognized plein air artists Lauren Sansaricq and Erik Koeppel of Jackson, N.H., also willopen on May 29.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous artists — including many from the Hudson River School — captured the awe-inspiring summits and verdant glens in the White Mountain region of western Maine and northern New Hampshire. Today, Erik Koeppel and Lauren Sansaricq create masterful works in the Hudson River style based on their love for the expressive potentials of traditional representation. Their extraordinary paintings recapture the lost techniques of the Hudson River School painters, whose works were characterized by a sense of air, dramatic light, distance, and luminosity.
The paintings in this exhibit, titled “The White Mountains: Alps of New England,” will be available for purchase over the duration of the show (new paintings will be added on a regular basis), with a portion of each sale going to support our public programming.
Finally, the Ski Museum of Maine’s inaugural exhibit in the “Western Mountains Gallery” will trace the roots of alpine and Nordic skiing and ski manufacturing at sites located within or near the borders of Oxford County. Through images, artifacts and vintage film, the Ski Museum will present the fascinating story of skiing in this area in an exhibit titled “Oxford County Skiing History: From Jockey Cap to Jordan Bowl.”
For more information about the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society, call 207-824-2908, 800-824-2910 or email director@bethelhistorical.org.
PHOTO: Rebecca White (Submitted photo)
