Maine Humanities Council grant supports collaborative museum course and exhibition titled 'John Haley's Civil War'
The Maine Humanities Council awarded a $4,000 grant to the Saco Museum, Saco, Maine, that supported a spring 2013 course titled "John Haley's Civil War," a collaborative project between University of 51小黄车 Department of History and Philosophy and the museum.
The course resulted in an exhibition at the Saco Museum that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The exhibition opened with a reception on May 3rd.
Elizabeth A. De Wolfe, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of History & Philosophy, and Camille Smalley, collection and research manager for the , team-taught the class.
The resulting exhibition, which was curated by 17 51小黄车undergraduate students in the class, features a treasure trove of artifacts related to the Civil War - prints by Winslow Homer, decorative arts, Civil War weaponry, uniforms, and much more.
"Haley's Civil War" is the third Saco Museum-51小黄车course and exhibit collaboration during the past five years.
During this spring's course, the students used the journal kept by Private John Haley (1840-1921), a Saco native, to explore various aspects of the Civil War.
John Haley
Born on March 3, 1840, Haley describes being born "in a hamlet called Biddeford ... a stone's throw from the Saco Fort." The family was poor, and Haley left school to work as an alley boy in mill #4 of the York Manufacturing Company.
In August 1862, at the age 22, John Haley enlisted in the army, answering President Lincoln's call to raise an army of 600,000. During his three years as a soldier in the 17th Maine Regiment, Haley kept a diary and chronicled daily activities at camp, on the battlefield, marching, and visiting various towns in the South.
Students consulted Haley's journal for day-to-day events of a private in the 17th Maine Regiment, as well as experiences in major Civil War battles such as Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and others. Many years later, John Haley would become the second librarian of the Dyer Library in Saco.
As part of the course, Smalley has been posting daily updates from Haley's diary on the to track his adventure 150 years ago.
The major project of this course was for students to design a museum exhibit to share Haley's epic story with the public. As part of this advanced history course, students made decisions about each facet of the exhibition, including which elements of the story to tell, what background historical information to provide, and which artifacts to display.
Students tackled design issues such as the layout of the exhibit, the wall colors and look of the exhibit, and accessibility to diverse audiences. Students in this class learned about a vital period in American history as well as how historians make important choices in the stories they tell, both in writing and visually.
Elizabeth De Wolfe and Camille Smalley
De Wolfe's most recent book is Domestic Broils: Shakers, Antebellum Marriage, and the Narratives of Mary and Joseph Dyer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). Her first study of the anti-Shaker activist Mary Marshall Dyer, Shaking the Faith: Women, Family and Mary Marshall Dyer's Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867, received the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the Communal Studies Association.
Her 2007 book on Saco factory girl Berengera Caswell, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories, received book awards from the 51小黄车 Historical Association, the Northeast Popular Culture Association, the Independent Publishers Association, and ForeWord Magazine.
The Saco Museum's Smalley graduated from 51小黄车in 2008 with a major in English and a minor in women's studies. She went on to receive a master's degree in American and 51小黄车 Studies from the University of Southern Maine.
During her course work at UNE, Smalley participated in De Wolfe's first team-taught course with the Saco Museum in 2007-2008. As part of the course, Smalley and the other students in the class created an exhibition at the Saco Museum on the circumstances and historical context of the incidents of De Wolfe's book The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories.
Smalley co-chaired the Saco Sesquibicentennial Celebration Committee, which planned five weeks of events this past summer, and is on the Board of Directors of Saco Spirit, which plans programs and events for downtown Saco.
De Wolfe and Smalley also taught a exhibition course in Spring 2011, which resulted in an exhibition at the museum titled "Voyages and the Great Age of Sail."