Page 18 - APRIL2025

Page 18
Community
NEWFOUNDLAKELIFE.COM April 2025
Museum of the White Mountains
THANK YOU to all that supported our trip to New Englands!
Selected to Hosts Smithsonian's
Museum Exhibition
Opening Reception: Friday, May 30, 4:00-6:00 pm
The Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University was selected by New Hampshire Humanities as one of three host sites in the state for the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street exhibition, Crossroads: Change in Rural America.
This exhibition explores pressing questions for rural communities: What does “rural America” mean? What makes
these places unique? How do we identify with them? How have rural communities and small towns evolved and changed? Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, small towns became centers of commerce, trade, local politics, and culture. For some, the crossroads affirmed a new life in a new place. For oth- ers, the crossroads meant hard work and hard times. Cross- roads aims to allow small towns and rural areas a chance to observe their own paths and to highlight the changes that have affected their trajectories over the past century.
To make this national exhibi- tion more relevant to our local community, we are developing a companion exhibition, The White Mountains: A Cross- roads, that explores the same themes of land, community, identity, persistence, and man- aging change in the context of the western White Mountains. We are doing this in partnership with the historical societies and public libraries in Plymouth, Franconia, Lincoln, Wood- stock, and Bethlehem. Using the buildings (a courthouse, a church, a café/store, and a farmhouse) where each group is housed as focal points, the ex- hibition explores how these five communities developed and continue to evolve.