At a Rural Crossroads: Smithsonian Exhibit Sparks Local Reflection

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By Katie Umans

When the Smithsonian’s Crossroads: Change in Rural America exhibit arrived at the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University, it looked a little like a band was rolling in for a rock concert, says Meghan Doherty, outgoing director of the museum–sixteen black cases of various shapes and sizes on wheels, complete with a 40-page installation manual.

But instead of drums and amps, what emerged from the cases were intricate frames and panels from the Smithsonian Institution, which developed their Museum on Main Street program to provide small-town America access to their research through traveling, ready-to-install exhibitions. The Museum of the White Mountains was selected this past year by New Hampshire Humanities as one of three host sites in the state for the Smithsonian’s 2025 Crossroads exhibit, developed to explore what happened when America’s rural population began rapidly declining (18% of the country’s population in 2010, down from 40% in 1900).

While some of the artifacts reproduced by the Smithsonian, including a reproduction of a Thomas Cole painting of the Willey House in Crawford Notch, reflected the very local landscape, “big sections felt like they had nothing to do with” life in the western White Mountains, admits Doherty. “The promotional material had very midwestern iconography,” rural life represented by two “dead flat dirt roads that meet with a tree at their center... That’s someone’s rural life, but that’s not my rural life.” 

To make this content more relevant to local visitors, the museum developed a companion exhibition, The White Mountains: A Crossroads, to explore the same themes of land, community, identity, persistence, and managing change in the context of the western White Mountains. The exhibit was displayed from late May through early September and included pieces loaned by the NH Historical Society as well as local historical societies and private collections.

There may not have been a 40-page manual for partnerships, but building those was its own complex process. Plymouth Historical Society and Pease Public Library were consistent through the project, but others came on board as the project took shape. Doherty had first heard about Crossroads in spring of 2023, when she had just hosted fourth graders from Plymouth Elementary. Inspired by interactions with the students and conversations with teachers, she originally conceived of working with local schools to develop curriculum based on the Smithsonian content. By the time everything was formalized and she had attended an oral history training that the Vermont Folklife Center provided for Crossroads host organizations, energy and commitments had rallied around another idea: developing an oral history project around the building of I-93. “As you get going other things will come to the surface that are priorities for your community and you want to listen to those,” she says. 

The project ended up being an opportunity for the museum to strengthen its relationship with public libraries and historical societies in Plymouth, Franconia, Lincoln, Woodstock, and Bethlehem, using as focal points the buildings (a courthouse, a church, a café/store, and a farmhouse) where each organization is housed and exploring how those five communities developed and continue to evolve.

In some ways, says Doherty, the project was “ten years too late.” Some of the people who had been most deeply involved in organizing resistance to the parkway and preserving the character of Franconia Notch had already passed away. Still, the controversial construction, which had required an act of congress because it deviated from what was designated as an Interstate in Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act, proved to be a fruitful chapter of local history around which to build an exhibit. A few interviewees had childhood stories of going up to the north country before I-93 was built. The Allure of The Notch section of the exhibit was dedicated to capturing life before the interstate—what it was like to drive up Route 3 from points southward, through Lincoln, on a section of road that, unless you’re going to the Flume, no one drives on much anymore. 

The culture and iconography of that lost route were truly brought home to Doherty by one piece borrowed from a private collection: a burner for balsam incense in the shape of one of the cottages at the Indianhead Resort in Lincoln. Even before the owner explained, an advisory council member who had grown up near Boston and had family in Lancaster knew exactly what the trinket depicted. She had driven up Route 3 every summer. For her, those cottages, with their sloped roofs, were the sign they were almost there.

Doherty is moving on from her position at the museum to serve as the executive director of Woodlawn Museum, Barn, and Grounds in Ellsworth, Maine. As she makes the transition, she reflects on the landscape and the community she is leaving. Unlike that dusty forked road featured on the Smithsonian’s training materials for Crossroads, her rural life is best represented by a view from her kitchen window of the Pemigewasset River and trees spanning the mountains that turn brilliant colors in the fall. “Power lines and a train bridge—those are the only human interventions.” 

At the same time, though the scenic beauty is “something most everyone who lives in this area values,” the lack of industrial or agricultural drivers means that affordability, especially around housing, is always a pressing and unresolved issue. Tourism alone truly drives the local economy. As Doherty puts it, “Yes, I have this train bridge, but now it’s the dinner train... and no one can afford to live here.” Lin-Wood, Lincoln’s local K–12 school, is down to under 250 students. Restaurants struggle to hire workers because the cost of housing, gas, and childcare means it’s not economically viable to work in the service industry. Doherty reports that, at an event at the Lincoln Public Library to accompany the Crossroads exhibit, members of the community were asked to fill a board with sticky notes expressing a wish for their community (a Smithsonian prompt). Three quarters of the post-its were about housing.

Doherty is also departing as funding cuts endanger small cultural institutions like the Museum of the White Mountains, “third spaces” that let us encounter people with different opinions and experiences outside of the private conversation of home or the public conversation of town meetings where you’re debating your tax bill. As we lose funding for the arts and cultural heritage, we lose those opportunities for a more gentle and open civil discourse. “We need that in this moment, perhaps more than ever in our history, and we are losing it at a rapid rate.” 

Katie Umans is Assistant Director at the University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities, and serves on the New Hampshire Humanities Board of Directors.

 

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