BANNER
YEAR BELFAST BRINGS LOCAL HISTORY TO LIFE TO CELEBRATE MAINE’S
BICENTENNIAL AND THE CIT Y’S 250 TH .
W
hen the pandemic scuttled plans to celebrate Maine’s bicentennial and Belfast’s 250th birthday, city leaders came up with a creative way for locals and visitors to pay homage to Belfast’s colorful history. They took it outside.
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The Penobscot Marine Museum teamed up with the Belfast Historical Society and Museum, and local designer Norma Whitman to create a series of six expansive banners with historic photos of city life, drawing on both museums’ vast collections. “We wanted images that celebrated Belfast’s architecture, industries, special places, and its citizens at work and at play,” says Kevin Johnson, photo archivist from the Penobscot Marine Museum. Each banner has a theme that relates to the location where it is hung. “It’s amazing to recognize what is still there, and see what is no longer,” he adds. The project was funded by grants from the Maine Bicentennial Commission and the City of Belfast. Other local partners included the Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce, the Belfast Creative Coalition, Whitecap Builders, and Our Town Belfast. The banners will remain up through Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021. Learn more about the collection at ourtownbelfast.org. 16
2 1: Masonic Building 137 High Street This banner shows residents at play across the ages. It includes a circus parade on Main Street — complete with a camel and an elephant that would have come to town via steamboat — which would have happened around 1900. It also includes a 1935 photo of the Colonial Theatre, which opened the night the Titanic made its fateful trip in 1912, and the Broiler Day Festival in 1949, a celebration of the city’s poultry-processing industry, which dominated the city in the middle part of the century.
2: Front Street Shipyard Spar Shed, on the Harbor Walk. 39 Front Street This banner pays homage to the city’s shipbuilding past, an appropriate theme for this location in Front Street Shipyard, which ushered in a modern era of shipbuilding to the city when it opened in 2011. The banner features the four-masted schooner Pendleton Brothers (II) under construction in Belfast around 1902 and The Pendleton Sisters on launch day in 1906.
B E L FA S T & T H E W O N D E R S O F WA L D O C O U N T Y
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2/26/21 12:35 PM
