For the third summer, the Presque Isle Historical Society’s Maysville Museum will open at its site on the Caribou Road on Saturday, June 1st.

At that time, the museum will debut a new exhibit titled “Quilts:  The Fabric of Life,” sponsored by Maine Humanities Council. The exhibit will showcase twelve antique quilts from the Historical Society's collection. Also featured will be poems written by eighth grade students from the Presque Isle Middle School.

The students were given the assignment of writing four types of poems: free verse, limericks, haikus and sonnets. The Historical Society's Kim Smith went around to the eighth grade classes to show the students some of the quilts up close, as well as pictures of the entire quilt collection. Students then had the choice of using one of the quilts as inspiration for their poems. Those quilt-inspired poems will be included in the exhibit, contained in a notebook and grouped by which quilt they were inspired by.

The quilts were also cataloged and properly stored and preserved for the future, as part of the Maine Humanities Council grant. The cataloging allows the Historical Society to inspect each quilt to see if the quilts were hand or machine stitched.

The Maysville Museum officially opens on Saturday, June 1st, at 10:00 am with a brief presentation at 10:15 explaining the exhibit. Admission to the museum is free. Summer hours will be from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm through October.

The museum is in need of volunteers to help staff it for the summer. If you're interested, contact Kim Smith at 762-1151 or by email at pihistoricalsociety@hotmail.com.

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