Open Mon–Fri, 9–1 · 2nd & 4th Sun, 1–4327 Main St, East Vassalboro, ME(207) 923-3505
Events & Programs
Talks, workshops, and gatherings
The Society runs programs through the year: local history talks, hands-on workshops, school visits, and our Heritage Village events. Everyone is welcome, members or not.
Upcoming
What's Coming Up
10/24 2026
“Lily's Apple Pie”: VHS Fundraiser Play
A comedy by local playwright Paul Cates, first performed in 2003 and returning this fall to benefit the Society. VHS President Jan Clowes plays Lily. Bring the whole family.
Vassalboro Grange · Saturday, October 24 at 7pm · $10 adults / $2 children under 12 · Tickets at the door
11/8 2026
Annual Meeting & Potluck
Open to the public. Bring a dish to share and hear what the Society has been up to this year, plus what's on the calendar for 2027.
Vassalboro United Methodist Church, 614 Main Street · 5pm · No RSVP needed
Third Sun Jan 2027
Show & Tell: Annual Treasures Event
Our beloved annual event. Bring a treasure or a mystery from home (something Vassalboro, something unusual, something you'd love to know more about) and share it with the group. Details announced closer to the date.
For Vassalboro Days the museum and every building in the Heritage Village stood open, nine to three on both days. Curator Susan Reidy worked the print shop in period dress, and the Community Quilt blocks came out of their cases and onto a clothesline strung between two trees.
What follows is what a visitor saw that weekend. The buildings are worth the walk, but the paperwork is the real find: the blacksmith’s bills, itemized and signed, and a frame of business cards from shops that closed a century ago.
Open for the weekend. The sign board on the grass outside the shops lists what waits behind the door: the harness shop, Free Press Printers, the post office, and the doctor’s office. Four trades under one roof.
The Heritage Village
Four trades under one roof
Outside the shops. The board stands on the grass by the steps, where anyone walking the Village can read the day’s four trades at a glance.The harness shop. Bridles, collars and traces hung where the maker could reach them. Every strap was cut to fit one animal, and the trade vanished with the working horse.Taylor’s Blacksmith Shop. Tongs racked in size order over the forge, the way a smith kept them so he never looked away from the fire.Stove bolts and cotter pins. Sorted by size and thread. A shop this far from a supplier threw nothing away, because the next one was a day’s travel.Free Press Printers. Curator Susan Reidy in period dress at the platen press. Every ticket, handbill and town notice started here, a sheet at a time.The boxes. Every family in the village had one of these small brass doors and knew its number by heart. The glass told you whether the walk was worth it.Stamps and General Delivery. Two signs, one window, and the grille the postmaster worked behind.One word on the door. No name, no hours, no appointment. In a village this size nobody needed telling which doctor.The doctor’s office. A washstand, a desk, a telephone. In a town this size the doctor came to you more often than you went to him.The school master’s desk. Originally owned by the Gardiner family and given to the museum by Mary Smith, it serves here as the doctor’s desk.The medicine case. Accession 76.1.2. A fitted row of stoppered vials, sized to ride in a bag on a house call.A local label. The benzine bottle reads J. L. Lightbody Apothecary, 55 Main Street, Waterville and North Vassalboro. The supplies came from the next village over.Crank, eye chart, and a bathtub on the wall. The oval on the left is not a lamp. It is a stand up bathtub, hung out of the way until Saturday night, when it came down and got filled a kettle at a time.Wood’s Emergency Case. A metal first aid kit of the kind kept in a mill, a garage, or a school.On the wall. Anatomical prints did the explaining, since most patients had never seen inside a body and never would.What the book said. A household medical volume, open to the chapter on the change of life. The tone tells you as much as the advice does about how medicine once spoke to women.
The town’s account with the blacksmith
Three bills lie open on the bench, all made out to people and bodies in this town. A. E. Doe, General Blacksmithing, difficult shoeing a specialty, billing Edward Taber in 1902. C. M. Appleton, carriage and sleigh manufacturing and repairing, billing the Town of Vassalboro in 1924. Herbert Ferran, horseshoeing and jobbing, North Vassalboro, telephone 592-4.
Repairing road machine Repairing sidewalk snowplow Shingle nails Two men shingling, one day
The newspaper beneath them is the Providence Evening Bulletin for Thursday, January 22, 1942, carrying war news and a Buy Defense Bonds line across the masthead.
A directory of shops that are gone
One frame beside the post office window holds most of the commercial life of two villages. Hoyt’s Express Company of East Vassalboro. G. H. Cates and Company, dry goods and ready made clothing. Grant Brothers, fine carriages and sleighs, North Vassalboro. J. E. Bessy’s corner grocery, a specialty made of White Puff flour. L. C. Barker, carriages. Fossett and Reed, brooms and brushes, Riverside.
The largest sheet advertises the Goodwin Washing Machine Company of North Vassalboro: no hand rubbing, boiling or steaming, ten dollars cash or eleven on the installment plan, agents wanted.
The Museum
Signs, uniforms, and the parlor
Vassalborough, with the ugh. J. Sturges’s tavern board, hung where travelers could see it from the road. The older spelling dates the sign more reliably than anything else on it.Two signs, two institutions. The Fire Department board with its crossed axes and ladder, and the galvanized Cooper’s sign below it. Signs outlive the businesses that hung them.The nails that held the church up. A spike and thirty odd hand forged nails, fanned out and labelled First Congo Church, Riverside. Each was drawn out on an anvil by hand, which is why a builder counted them.Two women, one dress form. The uniform belonged to Margaret Annette Lampson Davis, a technical sergeant in the Marines. The wool cape belonged to Mary Heeg, an Army nurse.Read the sleeves. The Eighth Air Force winged star, a Military Police shield, staff sergeant stripes. Each patch places a Vassalboro man or woman in a branch and a time.The bedroom. A signature quilt over a carved bed, a white nightdress on the form, a braided rug. The portraits on the wall are from the Ronco family. The small stove at the foot of the bed is the only heat in the room.A century of Monday. Two solid flatirons heated on the stove top, a detachable handle set so one handle served several bases, a gas iron, and an early electric with a braided cord.Bread by the bucketful. A Universal Bread Maker, gold medal winner at the St. Louis Exposition, with a crank lid and a four loaf capacity. Beside it a Sunbeam Mixmaster and a striped house dress.The spice shelf. Colman’s English Mustard, Stickney and Poor’s whole mustard seed out of Boston, Sauer’s celery salt, Slade’s pickling spice with its camel. A pantry assembled a tin at a time.Looking down on the pantry. A Rawleigh Pure Cinnamon tin carrying W. T. Rawleigh’s own portrait. Rawleigh men sold door to door, which is how half of this reached Vassalboro.The Grafonola. Before radio reached this far up the Kennebec, an evening’s music came out of a cabinet like this one, cranked by hand, one side at a time.Saved twice. The card records that it came from the home of the late Ina Hussey of East Vassalboro, spent years in a damp basement with the veneer lifting, and was restored by Charles “Chuck” Ferguson.Number, please. A wall set of about 1925, crank on the side. The directory beside it lists Vassalboro numbers of three and four digits, because there were few enough subscribers.Home entertainment, 1890. Two viewers and a cabinet of cards. The nearest thing a Vassalboro parlor had to travel.How it worked. Each eye sees one of the paired photographs and the brain fuses them into a scene with depth. The hood blocks the room so there is nothing to look at but the view.What you actually see. Looking through the viewer at a card of a gentleman in a top hat bargaining with a groom outside a stable. Two flat photographs, and then suddenly the horses stand behind the men.Where the cards went. Augusta, Orono, the Rangeley Lakes, Lewiston. Sold by subscription and traded between households, so a family that never left the county still knew the State House.A farmhouse, twice. Photographed by E. F. Smith, 109 Washington Street, Boston. Two exposures a few inches apart, printed side by side.The Underwood No. 5. The machine every later typewriter copied, with the type bars striking the front of the platen so the writer could finally see the line.The corner where people sat. A cane seat rocker, two side chairs, and a wall map of the kind that hung in schoolrooms and parlors alike.Braids and a flowered crown. Dressed with more care than most were, and kept long enough to reach a museum case.
Outside
The Community Quilt on the line
The quilt on the line. Blocks pegged out between two trees for the weekend, which is how quilts were always aired and still the best way to see one.Nonesuch Farm. Spot burning, raking blueberries, biennial burning, Fred Cain winnowing, spraying. A whole blueberry season in five blocks.Buildings people know. The library, the little red schoolhouse, the yellow house on the corner, made by people who pass them every day.Ballard House, and the 4-H. The Getchell’s Corner chapel, the Methodist church, and the Riverside All Stars, 1971 to 1980.
Recognize someone or something in these photographs, or can you tell us more about an object here? Write to vhspresident@gmail.com. If you would like a photograph removed, just say so and we will take care of it.
This Year
Recent Programs
A sense of what a year at the Society looks like.
9/12–13 2026
Vassalboro Days
Our biggest weekend of the year. The museum and every Heritage Village site stood open, nine to three on both days, and the new Community Quilt came out onto a clothesline between two trees. See the photographs.
Museum & Heritage Village · 9am–3pm both days · Free
8/16 2026
Mad Hatters Tea Party
A tea party at the Society, with everyone making a fascinator hat of their own.
327 Main Street · 3–5pm
6/27–28 2026
Ancient Ones Encampment
Re-enactors camped at our Heritage Village site, demonstrating period tools and crafts.
360 Main Street · All day
6/5–7 2026
Town Wide Yard Sale
The Society held its own sale at Ina’s Barn, next to the Grange, as part of the town-wide weekend.
Ina’s Barn, next to the Grange
5/17 2026
History of Vassalboro’s Fire Department
Tom Richards and Dick Jerolman presented the history of the Fire Department, with residents bringing stories and memorabilia.
327 Main Street · 3–5pm
Every Week
Regular Gatherings
Weekly
Coffee on the Porch
A long-running morning gathering with the Vassalboro Grange. The Society hosted it through the winter months so it could keep going in the cold, with good conversation, stories from Grange members, and a museum tour for anyone who wanted one.
Tuesday mornings · Call to confirm this season’s location
Seasonal
Senior-A-Tea
Older residents gather to reminisce over tea, coffee, and something sweet. All area seniors are welcome.
327 Main Street · Call for dates
By Arrangement
School & Group Visits
Classes and groups are welcome. Vassalboro Community School eighth-graders recently studied the Civil War here through the Vassalboro residents who served: what they carried, what they ate, and what their wool uniforms felt like.
