The American family farm is disappearing from the nation’s landscape, and this loss in the state of Maine not only impacts American culture but a unique regional cultural identity. Preserving The Curran Homestead ensures for future generations the values and customs of rural America, representing a time when self-reliance, cooperation, industry, and thrift were honored traditions. The Curran Homestead enriches the lives of our children, offers our community many opportunities for wholesome family fun, and serves as an excellent educational resource through its preservation and dissemination of family farm know-how, maintenance and continued use of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century material culture, and facilitation of hands-on activities and programs. As a cultural organization, our primary focus is the historical preservation of life on the Maine family farm at the turn of the 20th century.
Our Role in Education
The Curran Homestead is a community education resource. It focuses on familial learning experiences. It provides both a place and situation by which adults, as well as children with their parents, guardians, or caregivers, may acquire “how-to” and “hands-on” knowledge associated with rural Maine life at the turn of the 20th century. It is hoped that the knowledge garnered at this institution will ultimately be applicable to contemporary life serving to enrich, improve, and develop it with entertainments and skills more familiar to previous generations. Through its extensive collection of turn-of-the-century farm and farm household material culture, this living history museum recreates the past while at the same time facilitating new situations by which tools, equipment, and structures awaken a new sense of self-sufficiency and independence amongst the public it serves. We are committed to not only developing educational programming that emphasizes interactive and interpersonal learning modes but also those that focus on the tactile and kinesthetic for a variety of age groups.
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