Book and Oral History Exhibit
"Down on the Island, Up on the Main" Exhibit Ready to Travel.
The author: Ellen Vincent
The South Bristol Historical Society recently announced that arrangements are now in place and financing available so that the exhibit "Down on the Island, Up on the Main" can be transported and set up virtually anywhere in the state of Maine. This unusual show was prepared by photographer and oral historian Ellen Vincent and had its origins in 1995 when Vincent began collecting oral histories from longtime South Bristol residents and making copy negatives of family photographs, antique postcard collections and other memorabilia. During summers and while on a six-month sabbatical leave, Vincent gathered more than 80 hours of interviews from twelve women and eleven men, more than 380 photographs, and numerous artifacts.
The material is organized into sections that reflect different aspects of life in a Maine seacoast village such as women's work, fishing, farming, boat-building, children's games, and local characters. Each story is illustrated or explained by a photograph, and the resulting combination of pictures and words is sometimes poignant, often humorous, always informative. It represents a collective memory of place, spoken in the words of its people, in the stories and pictures gathered by artist and author Vincent.
The first show was mounted by Vincent at Round Top Center for the Arts in Damariscotta in 1998. Then in 2001 it appeared at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design where she is a professor. Subsequently, she developed a manuscript incorporating much of the same material, which was published in 2003 by the South Bristol Historical Society and Tilbury House Publishing as Down on the Island, Up on the Main: a Recollected History of South Bristol, Maine. In August of 2003, the South Bristol Historical Society and the South Bristol School hosted a weeklong expanded showing of the materials, visited by more than 650 people.
Although the images and the voices telling the stories all come from South Bristol, the memories could be of any small town in Maine. In fact, a visitor from England was enthralled with the exhibit, saying that the stories could just as easily have been told by her parents’ neighbors in a small English village. The show aroused tremendous community interest in oral history as a means of keeping the town¹s heritage alive for future generations. The South Bristol Historical Society is eager to share this source of inspiration with other groups as a meeting program or as an exhibit.
650 people visited the exhibit held in South Bristol in August 2003
For the South Bristol show, Vincent selected excerpts from the stories and the photographs which illustrate them and mounted them on lightweight but rigid panels approximately 3x4’ in size, which were then arranged in subject-matter groups around the room. This showing utilized all 55 panels and was set up in the elementary school gymnasium.
In November of 2006, a smaller exhibit was mounted at the Warren School as part of an in-service training program that had local history, and oral history in particular, as its focus. The panels were chosen from a list describing the contents of each panel and transported and set up by Historical Society volunteers. Other groups may wish to select different panels likely to be of particular interest to their members. The South Bristol Historical Society can deliver and help set up the show for other historical societies, schools or museums at no charge.
For more information about the show and how it can be brought to your organization, please contact Ellen Wells, President, SBHS at P.O. Box 229, South Bristol, Maine 04568 or by e-mail at: sbhs@tidewater.net