Arts & Cultural History

Grand Hotels and Quiet Tensions: How Gilded Age Visitors Remade Ogunquit's Social Landscape

When wealthy vacationers from Boston and New York began arriving in Ogunquit during the final decades of the nineteenth century, they encountered a tightly knit fishing community with centuries of self-sufficiency behind it. What followed was a transformation that reshaped the town's architecture, economy, and social fabric in ways that period photographs, property records, and newspaper accounts preserved in the Ogunquit Heritage Museum's archives make vividly legible. The story of Ogunquit's G

Jul 27, 2026

Voices Against the Tide: The Urgent Work of Capturing Ogunquit's Living Memory

As the last generation of Ogunquit residents who experienced the village before its transformation into a major tourist destination ages, local historians and archivists are racing to record their stories. The effort to preserve these oral histories is as much a community act as a scholarly one — a recognition that the truest account of any place lives not in documents alone, but in the memories of those who shaped it.

Jul 27, 2026

Canvas and Community: How a Generation of Artists Transformed a Fishing Village Into Maine's Creative Heart

In the early decades of the 20th century, a remarkable convergence of painters, sculptors, and writers descended upon the small fishing village of Ogunquit, Maine, drawn by its extraordinary light, dramatic coastline, and the promise of a community built around creative work. What followed was a cultural transformation that reshaped the town's identity in ways still visible — and still celebrated — today. The Ogunquit Heritage Museum traces the arc of that transformation and the visionary indivi

Jul 27, 2026