Bangor museum announces UM history exhibit

BANGOR – The Bangor Museum and Center for History is the host for “Buildings, Traditions, Students,” an exhibit about the history of the University of Maine campus.

“Buildings, Traditions, Students” focuses on student life at UM. It consists of photos of campus buildings and student activities; memorabilia from alumni, such as college banners and tickets to sporting events; and copies of The Prism, the campus yearbook, which dates back to 1895.

The university was founded in 1864 as the Maine State College of Agriculture and Mechanics as part of the federal Land Grant Act of 1862. A site for Maine’s land grant college was chosen along the Stillwater River in Orono and the property was acquired in 1866. The campus expanded from its original site containing two farmhouses and their dependencies to a cluster of academic, agricultural and domestic structures supporting the college’s mission to provide postsecondary education.

By 1915 the campus consisted of academic buildings facing the Stillwater River and agricultural buildings for the college farm located to the east. The college’s trustees hired the renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted of Boston to design a plan for the campus that used the river as its focal point. Although they never executed Olmsted’s design, the trustees adopted many of his ideas in the early years of campus planning.

From the early 1920s to the end of World War II, the central campus mall became the locus for new construction. The university hired the Olmsted Brothers, Frederick Law Olmsted’s successor firm, to provide a campus plan in 1932. It proposed a campus mall, a smaller central green space for the south end of campus oriented on a north-south axis, as well as other landscape features. While the university’s administration embraced the mall, it decided not to incorporate many of the Olmsted Brothers’ suggestions.

Veterans’ educational benefits after World War II launched the third phase of campus growth, accelerating construction primarily around the immediate periphery of the mall. In the following years, the university continued to expand outward from the campus core.

“Buildings, Traditions, Students” was developed as part of a Campus Heritage Initiative grant the university received from the Getty Foundation in 2004 to prepare a preservation plan for the campus. A museum studies intern, Valerie Mitchell, is curator for the exhibit, which was on display in the Memorial Union on the UM campus from April though October 2005.

The Bangor Museum and Center for History is open to the public 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday at 6 State St. in Bangor.

Sara Martin will give an illustrated lecture about the history of the UM campus at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 29, at the museum. Martin was an architectural historian for the University of Maine Campus Heritage project. She is the education coordinator of the Bangor Museum and Center for History.