Museum on Main Street
Museum on Main Street (MoMS) is a Smithsonian outreach program that engages small town audiences and brings traveling exhibitions, educational resources and programming to rural towns across America through their own local museums, historical societies and other cultural venues.
New Hampshire Humanities is partnering with Museum on Main Street and Vermont Humanities to bring traveling Smithsonian exhibits to towns in both states.
Spark! Places of Innovation will be on display in New Hampshire from October 2026 - March 2027.
Crossroads: Change in Rural America was on display from August 2024 - September 2025.
Spark! Places of Innovation
Spark! Places of Innovation is a traveling exhibit from
the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street program. It features stories from over 30 rural communities across the nation that explore the relationship between place and creativity. For every community, there is a unique combination of history, resources, leadership, collaboration, and opportunity that resulted in invention and innovation—socially, artistically, technologically, or culturally.
Spark! Places of Innovation builds upon the invaluable assets of rural towns and offers residents and visitors the opportunity to reflect upon innovations from the past and present in their communities. The exhibit explores the combinations of places, people, and circumstances that spark innovation and invention in rural communities. Inspired by an exhibition by the National Museum of American History, the exhibit features stories gathered from diverse communities across the nation. Photographs, objects, videos, and augmented reality reveal the leaders, challenges, successes, and future of innovation in each town.
The exhibit is organized into topics that explore innovation in rural America:
- Technological innovation
- Cultural heritage innovation
Each host site will implement complementary, community driven programming based around one or more themes. While each site hosts the same exhibit, each experience will be as unique as the town that houses it!
Spark! Places of Innovation Tour Dates:
Rockingham Memorial Library, Bellows Falls, VT: June 16 - July 27, 2026
Barnet Public Library, Barnet, VT: July 30 - September 8, 2026
Swanton Public Library, Swanton, VT: September 12 - October 16, 2026
Berlin Historical Society, Berlin, NH: October 21 - December 11, 2026
Mariposa Museum, Peterborough, NH: December 18 - February 8, 2027
Canaan Historical Society, Canaan, NH: February 15 - March 26, 2027
Previous Exhibits
Crossroads: Change in Rural America
What does "rural America" mean? And how have our small towns changed?
The celebration of New Hampshire Humanities' 50th anniversary continued with a new initiative that brought Granite Staters together to explore our shared history– in particular, how our small towns have evolved and what makes these places unique. New Hampshire Humanities partnered with Vermont Humanities and the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street program to bring a traveling exhibit, Crossroads: Change in Rural America, to small towns in both states from August 2024-September 2025.
Crossroads offered rural towns the opportunity to highlight and reflect on the changes that have affected their fortunes over the past century. Despite economic and demographic shifts, America’s small towns continue to find new creative opportunities for economic innovation and cultural life. Crossroads encouraged discussion about how these changes impacted small towns and the ways that rural towns are important assets to the nation.
Each host site of Crossroads collaborated with their local community to plan, shape, and implement the exhibit, defining what the project means to them. To build on local partnerships and encourage community members to get involved, all three sites in New Hampshire incorporated a series of public events or projects into the Crossroads exhibit, each one unique to its location.
Explore Previous Museum on Main Street Exhibitions in NH
Jefferson Historical Society
Museum of the White Mountains
River Valley Community College
Museum on Main Street is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and brought to you by New Hampshire Humanities and Vermont Humanities.
