BELLOWS FALLS-A multimedia exhibit on how rural communities across the country have creatively responded to economic and social challenges, created by the Smithsonian Institution, had its soft opening at the Rockingham Free Public Library (RFPL) on June 16. A grand opening and open house will be held Saturday, June 27.
After its start in Bellows Falls, the exhibit moves on to five other libraries, historical societies, and museums throughout Vermont and New Hampshire.
Three sites in each state will host the exhibit for six weeks each: Barnet Public Library (July and August); Swanton Public Library (September and October); Berlin (New Hampshire) Historical Society (November and December); and Mariposa Museum, Peterborough, New Hampshire (January and February 2027), and the Canaan (New Hampshire) Historical Society (February and March 2027).
The upstairs meeting room of the Rockingham Free Public Library looked like backstage at a rock concert last week as the library prepared for the first showing of the exhibition, a partnership with the Vermont Humanities and New Hampshire Humanities.
It takes 11 large rolling crates, each carrying hundreds of pounds of the display, along with detailed instructions on how to put it together. A large box truck moves the display from site to site.
Robbie Davis, project director for digital programs at the Museum on Main Street at the Smithsonian, the division of the museum that offers traveling exhibitions, was on hand to oversee and instruct approximately 20 people at RFPL on how to put the display together.
The Museum on Main Street program “brings professionally designed, developed, curated, and constructed museum exhibits to small towns across the United States,” said RFPL Director Ian Graham.
Some were local volunteers doing the actual assembling for the Bellows Falls show. With Smithsonian staff overseeing that work only at this first showing, the rest were staff from the other exhibit sites who came to learn how to unpack, assemble, tear down, and re-crate the extensive display.
Setting the displays up properly — and, in particular, getting power to each of the interactive, multimedia kiosks — will be a special challenge for some of the rural and older Vermont and New Hampshire display sites, organizers said.
‘You always say yes’
Inspired by an exhibition by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, “Spark!” features stories gathered from diverse communities across the nation, including Bethel, Vermont.
Using examples from Taos, New Mexico, to Independence, Oregon, “Spark!” highlights how communities have adapted creatively to changes using technology, the town’s geography, infrastructure, architecture, history, culture, and art, to create new opportunities for work and education for all, and especially young people.
Robert McBride, the founder and director of the Rockingham Arts and Museum Project (RAMP), said he was contacted by the two state humanities organizations asking if he would like to host the first showing of the exhibition in Bellows Falls.
He said he immediately understood how large and important the exhibit would be for Bellows Falls.
“You always say yes to such a great opportunity being offered to your community,” McBride said. “It came to us. Now it’s up to us to take advantage of it.”
He said he talked with Graham, and they agreed that the library’s upstairs meeting room would be an ideal location for the exhibit.
“The library considers it a great honor to be able to not only provide local and not-so-local folks access to a Smithsonian exhibit but to be the first in Vermont to host ‘Spark!,’” he said.
Graham said that the library has “stretched our hours a bit,” opening on some Sunday afternoons.
Working with Vermont Humanities, New Hampshire Humanities, the Smithsonian, and representatives from the five additional institutions in Vermont and New Hampshire that will also host the exhibit “has been lots of fun,” he said.
The exhibit has “also has created new partnerships that we expect will bring many more exciting opportunities to Rockingham, Vermont, and New Hampshire in the future,” Graham added.
Building community in Bethel
The exhibit highlights the Bethel Revitalization Initiative (BRI), a grassroots program started in 2013 in Bethel, a small Windsor County town of 2,000.
The group’s first effort was small, turning a “weedy, overgrown lot” into a small “pocket park with a view of the river.” A handful of volunteers with a few hand tools made it happen.
BRI next established Bethel University, a “free, community, pop-up” program that invited local people to teach any topic they wanted for a month. They began with volunteers teaching 21 classes that ranged from “bread making to blacksmithing.”
By the third year, more than 1,000 students were coming in from around the region for dozens of free classes, including basic Spanish and French to beer making, square dancing, cartooning, tarot reading, photography, and basic car maintenance.
The exhibit highlights BRI as one of many of examples of the “Spark!” effect in small, rural towns — a handful of community members innovating on the pop-up model, taking quick action, with little or no expense, and creating programs that have helped thousands of participants. The Bethel University program continues to grow and thrive.
“‘Spark! Places of Innovation’ will be the springboard for diverse local programming in the humanities, sciences, and arts,” the Smithsonian said in its description of the program.
“Visitors will be inspired to learn about how innovation has shaped their own communities and how they may be innovators themselves,” the description continued. “This exhibition will be an opportunity for community members to come together in conversation around their community’s history, present, and future with innovation.”
Sparking discussion and community
Though the exhibit focuses to a degree on the history of the communities it highlights, McBride said the exhibit “is not about getting lost in the history” of a community, but to “spark interest in the knowledge of what is happening now, what is still happening and in the future. Invention, innovation and creativity are not just lost in the past, they are still happening.”
In that spirit, he urged local people, businesses and organizations to “call and invite others to the exhibit.”
“That’s now where our work begins for RAMP, the RFPL, area historical societies, and area chambers of commerce,” McBride said.
McBride said it will be interesting to see how each site leverages the exhibit for community interaction and discussion. He said that regional groups should take advantage of having such an important exhibit in the community and see visiting the exhibit as “a group activity.”
“This is a real opportunity for these organizations to come here, see the exhibit, and to tell their own stories of invention, innovation and creativity that is happening right now,” he said.
Spark! will be on display upstairs at the Rockingham Free Public Library, 65 Westminster St., Bellows Falls, through Sunday, July 26, with special hours Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. A grand opening and open house takes place Saturday, June 27 from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. For more information, visit vermonthumanities.org/programs/attend/museum-on-main-street/spark.
This News item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.