Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Festival will be July 18-21

GREENVILLE – The 12th annual Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Festival runs Wednesday, July 18 to Saturday, July 21 at The Center for Moosehead History, 6 Lakeview Street in downtown Greenville.

This year James Francis, director of the Penobscot Nation’s Cultural and Historical Preservation Department; Chris Sockalexis, the Penobscot Nation Tribal Historic Preservation officer; and Julia Gray, archeologist and past director of Native American Collections and Research at the Abbe Museum, are featured guest speakers.

“Tracing Thoreau’s Trail: East Cove to Katahdin” is a series of 35 large black and white photographs by 1920s Bert Lincoln Call, a professional photographer who traced Thoreau’s trails through the Maine woods.

“What Thoreau captured in prose, Call captured in pictures,” said Suzanne AuClair, executive director of the Moosehead Historical Society. “We’re extremely fortunate to have the guest speakers we do have this year. Also, the Thoreau pictures are very, very fine. We were able to bring them to the site of Thoreau’s launch here at East Cove in Greenville by special arrangement with curator Frank Spizuoco.”

Call’s work was brought back to life by Todd Watts, an internationally recognized professional photographer who took the original negatives and printed them. Watts’s own work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Princeton and Yale, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Ansel Adams Center for Photography in San Francisco, Paris, Vienna, and Australia, among other places.

Also on tap is Lee Kantar, lead moose biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife; Janice Kimball King, expert ash pack-basket maker; and Shannon Durose, who will demonstrate the art of candle making.

A Friday night BBQ begins at 5 p.m. followed by Nashville recording artist Rod Picott. Both will take place at the Greenville Village gazebo, located next to the Moosehead Marine Museum which will also be opened for tours that evening. A popular four-day silent auction with many unusual items also runs throughout the festival at The Center for Moosehead History.

Unless otherwise noted, all programs take place at The Center for Moosehead History. For each day’s events, times and locations, please check the website for particulars at www.NRECmoosehead.org or call the historical society at 695-2909. The festival is made in partnership between the Natural Resource Education Center and the Moosehead Historical Society and museums.

Photo courtesy of Dexter Historical Society
TRACING THOREAU’S TRAIL — Dexter native Bert Lincoln Call’s 1920s photos of Henry David Thoreau’s canoe trips are on exhibit at The Center for Moosehead History in Greenville throughout the summer. The exhibit opens the annual Thoreau Wabanaki Trail Festival running from July 18-21.