Category: Outdoors

Show and tell at the Canterbury Shaker Village

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

According to Garrett Bethmann of the Canterbury Shaker Village Museum, our modern conception of the Shakers — devout Protestants who lived in self-contained communities across the United States in the 1700s and 1800s — is intimately tied in with the objects they made. “I think the first thing [people think of] is certainly the more stereotypical artifacts and objects that feel very classified as Shaker and very much kind of have that Shaker aesthetic of clean lines, very efficient-looking use, very simple … look to them. So, you know, that’s kind of where you get into your furniture, your oval boxes, your brooms.”

On Saturday, Sept. 26, the Shaker Village Museum will present an interactive look at some of those objects, called “Artifact Speed Dating — Canterbury Shaker History in 10 Objects.” This event is part of “We Want More History!,” an initiative by the Organization of American Historians to present historical education at events on the same day at “libraries, parks, museums, and other civic spaces” across the country, according to the initiative’s website. “It responds to heightened public interest in history and historical interpretation. Historians and educators are positioned as scholars and teachers committed to the public good through evidence-based, contextualized understanding of the past, in order to promote excellence in scholarship, encourage wide public discussion, and advocate for history. It ensures that national commemorations reflect the full, complex story of the people and places that make up the United States.”

Which is where the Shakers and their objects come in.

Shirley Wajda, the Shaker Museum’s curator of research and collections, will lead an exploration of different Shaker objects and how we can determine when an object was made or used.

“It will be a lecture,” Bethmann said, “that allows people to see objects close up. It will be in the spirit of, ‘Check this out! Here is a little bit of history, information and context.’ It will be an interactive lecture.”

“The importance of establishing dates for particular artifacts,” Bethmann said, “is to be able to identify when a certain object was used … because that can be insightful as to how they used it and what they were using it for.”

By looking at objects the Shakers owned, Bethmann said, we gain a deeper understanding of the world around them and what kind of technology was available to them.

“I think the objects that can grab people’s attention,” he said, “are the objects that are less associated with Shakers [in particular]. For instance, one thing I always find cool when I’ve walked around the [Shaker] Village is in one of our areas we have a telephone. Seeing a telephone, electrical wires, and seeing an object that is more tied to a modern America or to kind of a contemporary outlook that doesn’t necessarily include our antiquated and kind of folkloric romanticism of them, I think people will always find those types of objects interesting because they find themselves saying, ‘Huh, really? I didn’t think this type of society would be into that type of technology or that type of innovation.’ In fact, Shakers in general were relatively welcoming and inclusive of innovative technologies and things that made their lives easier. Objects like that are more closely associated with American culture, and not Shaker-specific, and can be attention-grabbing for [modern] people.”

The objects themselves are being kept under wraps until the actual event, Bethmann said. “We’re not going to talk about the specific items because that would be a spoiler.”

Artifact Speed Dating — Canterbury Shaker History in 10 Objects
Where: Canterbury Shaker Village, 288 Shaker Road, Canterbury, 783-9511, shakers.org
When: Saturday, Sept. 26, from 2 to 3:30 p.m.
Tickets: General admission tickets are available through the museum’s website for $20, or $10 for museum members.
More: shakers.org and wewantmorehistory.org.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Concord Multicultural Festival celebrates the community

Concord will hold its annual Multicultural Festival on Sunday, Sept. 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Keach Park, on Newton Avenue.

“It’s an annual festival with food and music and art and activities and community,” said organizer Jessica Livingston. “We come together every year to celebrate all of the different cultures [in the Concord community]. And when I say all, I mean all of the different cultures, not just the newer ones. We come together to celebrate everybody’s culture and share with each other through everybody’s favorite universal things: food, music and art.”

Livingston said one of the throughlines of the Festival, something that ties everything together, is the music.

“We have a whole lineup of music, like we always do,” she said, “but it changes. Sindy [Chown], our performance coordinator, is really great at keeping all of the favorites while also bringing in new types of performances. We get access to all different types of music and performances and dance from all over the world.”

For many festivalgoers the main draw is the food.

“We have commercial food vendors, food trucks, like most festivals do,” Livingston said, “but we also open [the festival] up to community members to share their food and sell their food.” She said that by partnering with the New Hampshire Food Bank, the Festival makes it fairly straightforward for community cooks to sell their food and still meet food licensing and safety regulations. “Our community cooks will go down there [to the New Hampshire Food Bank commercial kitchen] and cook and prep all of their food. It’s this big production that everybody loves. The cooks get to work in this great beautiful state-of-the-art commercial kitchen and work with the cooks from the Food Bank. There are chefs there, but then there’s also people working and training for some of their culinary programs. It’s a great experience for everybody, including the volunteers. I had a volunteer tell me one year that we should start charging for experience. It’s like a VIP kind of access to how food is made, but also you get to try the foods before they’re served.”

“We have a lot of community cooks this year,” Livingstone continued, “which is wonderful. We have a Jamaican food vendor this year; we’ve never had Jamaican food there before, other than some of the vendors do sort of Caribbean-style food, but this person is from Jamaica. We have the usual Nepali favorites like samosas [South Asian fried dumplings] and the roti [a laminated Indian flat bread]. And we have food from the Middle East and just a whole array of different types of food. People are definitely going to want to come with an appetite.”

Livingstone said that this year, even more than in previous years, the arts will play a big role in the Multicultural Festival.

“One sad thing,” she said, “is that we used to have the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts work with us and, as you know, [that agency] has all but closed, which is very sad for the whole state for so many reasons. But it was always great to work with them, because they were able to sponsor some of the traditional artists who continue to practice traditional crafts and making, like basket weaving and things like that. We have artists who will come and sell their work. We have, of course, [Iraqi painter] Saad Hindal, who is a gem in our community. He will be selling his paintings. We also have other artist-vendors who will be selling their handmade products — either handmade, specific cultural products or immigrant-owned creative businesses.”

Concord Multicultural Festival
When: Sunday, Sept. 20, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Keach Park in Concord Heights
More: concordnhmulticulturalfestival.org

Featured photo: Multicultural Festival. Courtesy photo.

Hillsborough County Fair, with a focus on 4-H

The 68th Annual Hillsborough County Agricultural Fair will be held at the New Boston fairgrounds from Friday, Sept. 11, through Sunday, Sept. 13. Like all New Hampshire’s county fairs, it is an agricultural fair, but as Eric McCambly of Hillsborough County 4-H explained, the focus at this particular fair is more on agriculture than at some other, bigger fairs.

“It’s in New Boston,” he said, “which is a rather rural community. It’s a three-day event, whereas some of the other fairs around the state could be five [days] or an entire week long, with more that goes into them. It’s a little bit on a smaller scale.”

While other fairs might feature demolition derbies or classic cars, for instance, the Hillsborough County fair has events like rodeo events, line-dancing demonstrations, and a presentation from New Hampshire Fish and Game on bobcats. For an organization like 4-H, McCambly said, the fair presents an opportunity for members to have their work stand out.

“It’s a prime time for them to showcase their skills,” he said, “and … projects that they’ve been working on throughout the year and … demonstrate that knowledge within their realm of specialties. We are expecting 80 different entries all across the board in dogs, sheep, goats, chickens and poultry, cows, steers, rabbits. This also includes our 4-H exhibit hall, where kids do all kinds of projects. Maybe they did a STEM project for the year, maybe they did an art project that they’d like to show off, and it’s also an opportunity for our 4-H clubs to show the public exactly what they do.” McCambly pointed out that Hillsborough County 4-H sent a robotics team to a world championship in Houston earlier this year.

“Our fair is way more family-oriented than most of them,” said Michelle Tulip, the president of the Fair’s board of directors. “We have something for everyone. We’ve added a whole bunch of new events this year that we hope the families coming in will enjoy. And we are very agriculture-based.”

Tulip said people come to this fair from all walks of life.

“We have fans of all ages, I think, that come out,” Tulip said. “New Hampshire has a lot of fairs and they’re all great, but I think that ours not only attracts a different group of people, people get excited about it because it’s not overwhelming like some of the bigger ones. We don’t have the lines for the rides and the lines to get in the gate like you find at other ones. You can get great food. We have a ton of vendors this year. We do have rides, but not a ton. And there’s just a lot to see and do to keep you busy, but it’s not overwhelming. We do see a lot of repeat people, and we’re working to get a new crowd in, but we try to stay very family-oriented and very agriculture-oriented.”

The Fair’s website lists some events and competitions that will take place over the weekend, including gymkhana (horsemanship), horseshoe throwing, an apple pie contest, baking competitions across multiple categories sponsored by King Arthur Flour (including gluten-free baking), cake decorating, canned, preserved, and pickled goods, arts, crafts, sewing, needlework, quilting, photography and woodworking. As expected at an agricultural fair like Hillsborough County’s, there will be horse, mule and ox pulling. There will be food and craft vendors there as well.

Hillsborough County Agricultural Fair
When: Friday, Sept. 11, from noon to 9 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 13, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Where: New Boston 4-H Youth Center, 17 Hilldale Lane, New Boston
Admission: $10 for adults and $5 for military members, veterans with ID, and seniors 65+, cash only
More: hcafair.org