Page Farm and Home Museum Important Resource for Maine Schools

Of the thousands of people who tour the Page Farm and Home Museum every year, perhaps the most important are those who arrive in busloads from schools across Maine. Too many of these young folks think that hamburger comes from fast food restaurants and corn on the cob originates in a grocery store, wrapped in cellophane. They have little concept of where the food is grown and the hard work that goes into coaxing it from the soil.

Here at the Page Farm and Home Museum, located on the University of Maine campus in Orono, children come to learn about farming and other traditional occupations. Inside the restored post-and-beam barn, built in 1833, they examine a horse-drawn plow, a spinning wheel,  a butter churn and other items unfamiliar to this age of fast food and cell phones. They hear recorded voices of people who lived in rural Maine before World War II. They visit the restored one-room schoolhouse from Holden, used by students from 1855 to 1944, the Pullen Carriage House and Blacksmith Shop, and the 1/4 acre Heritage Garden, which round out the Museum. In the process, they are drawn into a celebration of the values of families, community, farm, school, and home--values that shaped rural Maine.

In the 2007 school year, 141 school groups attended 11 different programs. "All Museum programs have been developed to satisfy standards set by the Maine Learning Results," says Patricia Henner, director and curator of the Museum. "All program participants are provided with lesson plans for the activities that state the objectives, goals, and procedures of each activity with connections to Maine Learning Results."

The Museum has partnered with the Maynard F. Jordan Planetarium for a UMaine Field Trip Adventures program, which promises to take students and their teachers on "journeys of the mind."

Other special programming includes the successful Brown Bag Lecture series, offered at least monthly, which feature local artisans, crafts people, university educators, and experts in fields related to the Museum's interests. In addition, thousands of patrons come to the Museum each year to learn about the industry, agriculture, economy and home life of the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum is also host to many groups and organizations who choose to hold meetings and events at this historic property.

All this comes with a cost, of course, and The Page Farm and Home Museum Endowment Fund was established in the University of Maine Foundation in 1995 to support and maintain the Museum and its mission, which is to collect, document, preserve, interpret and disseminate knowledge of Maine history relating to farms and farming communities between 1965 and 1940.

If you would like to contribute to the Page Farm and Home Museum Endowment Fund, you may do so by contacting us at 1-800-982-8503. You may contribute on line using our secure website at  www.umainefoundation.org/ssl_secure/

For more information about the Page Farm and Home Museum visit their website at www.umaine.edu/pagefarm/ or contact Patricia Henner, director and curator, at (207) 581-4100.

The Page Farm and Home Museum is not only a celebration of the past...Within this heritage are instructions for the future.