The Casco History Lab at Wolfe’s Neck Center is a place-based learning resource utilizing the rich cultural geography and built environment of our Freeport campus to connect people through history from time immemorial to today. Generations of people have cared for this place. As the current stewards, Wolfe’s Neck Center continues this tradition by exploring regenerative food systems, including support for restoring relationships with the land through community and collaboration.

The Casco History Lab develops and shares place-based knowledge preserved through oral traditions, historic records, archaeological sites, and buildings that tells the stories of how people have cared and stewarded this land over millennia. History Lab experiments will engage many constituents, including anthropologists, descendants, educators, historians, institutions of higher learning, and scientists. The research results will be widely accessed through onsite and online public programming, often in cooperation with primary and secondary schools, academic and research institutions, and History Lab collaborators.

As the Public Historian for Wolfe’s Neck Center, Tilly Laskey manages the Casco History Lab, leveraging decades of experience building reciprocal working relationships with Indigenous communities in museums. Located on Abenaki and Penobscot Homelands, the Center’s 626-acre campus remains largely unchanged since English settler colonialists established farms in the 1660s on what is now called Wolfe’s Neck. Historic resources include Ulster Scots archaeological digs and houses from the 1718s, a 1750s Saltbox house on the National Register of Historic Places and barn owned by an international sea captain, and other historic buildings such as the 1890 Mallet Barn, a grand post-and-beam structure.

Current projects include ReDiscovered & ReConnected: Penobscot People in Casco Bay and the formation of America, a community-centered research project in partnership with the Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department and funded by the Maine Semiquincentennial Commission. ReDiscovered & Reconnected will start conversations and conduct archival research that work to restore Wabanaki access and relationships with their ancestral Homelands, recover and activate archival and primary source documents about Indigenous histories of the region, and provide a platform for Penobscots to share the stories they feel are important.

The Casco History Lab builds reciprocal collaborations with Wabanaki, Black and local communities; offers spaces where stakeholders can convene; provides support for avocational and academic researchers to conduct and share work; forges alliances with regional history organizations; and actively engages with schools and youth.

The Lab finds relevance in the past by connecting local history to regional, national and global topics and promoting interdisciplinary research that inspires people toward creative solutions for contemporary agricultural, environmental and social challenges. This approach promotes inclusive and accurate histories related to humans’ relationship to food, the land, the rivers, and the ocean. It creates a sense of belonging by forging physical connections to the historic and cultural landscapes of the Harraseeket River Historic District. And it adds unique dimensions and connections to Wolfe’s Neck Center’s work across experiential education, agricultural research, and farmer training.

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