UMaine Students Share How Maine Commemorated 1876 & 1976

About this event

Join us for a participatory poster session by UMaine students and local history specialists in the Lecture Hall. Undergraduates in a Public History course at UMaine will share their research about how Maine commemorated the national Centennial in 1876 and the Bicentennial in 1976. Can this help us to better understand our contemporary commemorative moment of 2026? They will be joined by library and historical society specialists from across the state. This will mostly be a one-on-one poster-session program for informal discussions. If you have personal memories of the bicentennial, we hope you will share them with us.

The poster session will end at 1:30PM. Those who are interested can then join a walking tour of the re-installed interpretive signs on the Kenduskeag Stream Heritage Trail, which were researched and written by UMaine History students. We will also discuss the recent murals along the trail. The tour will leave from the library, but we will carpool to the start of the walking tour at the first interpretive sign at the former dam site at the bottom of Bruce Road. From there we will walk the trail downstream and end near the confluence of the Kenduskeag and the Penobscot River. The walk is 1.9 mile, and the tour of the trail will last approximately 75 minutes.

Participating Organizations Include: UMaine History Students; Fogler Library, UMaine; Bangor Public Library; Hansen Memorial Library, Mars Hill; Bangor Historical Society; Pejepscot History Center, Brunswick; Bangor Beautiful; Maine Archives and Museums.