From the Archives: Maple Sugar Thanksgiving March 3, 1973
Belonging(s): “A close relationship among a group and personal or public effects”
“Asco wequassinummis, neetompooag” (Hello my friends)!
Hello! Welcome back to another installment of the From the Archives series where Collections and Archive Manager Anthony Belz shares some of the more interesting materials in the Tomaquag Museum archival collections.
n this installment, we will be taking a look back exactly 50 years to Maple Sugar Thanksgiving March 3, 1973.
Maple Sugar Thanksgiving Ashaway, Tomaquag Valley, 1959. Chester Brown (left), Redwing Mary Ella Gongdon and Pine Needles Adele Rhodes
Tomaquag Museum Archives.
To begin, I would like to give you a brief look back at the history of Maple Sugar Thanksgiving at the Tomaquag Museum. The very first Maple Sugar Thanksgiving was held the second year the museum was in existence (1959) when it was located in Ashaway, Rhode Island in Tomaquag Valley, the location for which the museum was named. This photograph, one of three in the archives from the Maple Sugar Thanksgiving from that year also has the distinction of being the earliest photographic documentation of not only Maple Sugar Thanksgiving at the museum, but any Thanksgiving (the second oldest are four photographs of Strawberry Thanksgiving June 1960). This first Maple Sugar Thanksgiving was held even before the museum opened its doors to the public on August 30, 1959. In this photograph Redwing, then Program Director, stands in front of a maple tree, (to her right Chester Brown, to her left in the background is Pine Needles) and is surrounded by children.
As I began researching for documentation of Maple Sugar Thanksgiving in the archives, I discovered inconsistent representation of materials for each Thanksgiving that were held in the past. In the earliest years of the museum from 1958-1986 (the year Redwing retired at age 90), and unlike today, the museum celebrated four Thanksgivings a year.
The four Thanksgivings were Maple Sugar, Strawberry, Green Bean, and Cranberry (and sometimes Nikommo). Today, the museum celebrates three Thanksgivings, Strawberry, Cranberry and Nikommo. However, the lack of documentation does not mean the museum didn’t celebrate these four (or five) Thanksgivings every year, it’s just that the archive does not have documentation for each Thanksgiving, which usually includes photographs, Redwing’s handwritten scripts for the events, or flyers advertising the events.
The very last documentation for Maple Sugar Thanksgiving at the museum was in 2009, so we know these Thanksgivings were held for fifty years, but we simply don’t have a complete record of them in the archives.
That being said, one Maple Sugar Thanksgiving in particular has considerably more documentation than others. As I was browsing through the boxes that contain the museum’s history, I discovered that Maple Sugar Thanksgiving March 3, 1973 was particularly well documented with a handwritten script by Redwing, six photographs, 16 photographic slides and a newspaper article covering the event. By this time, the museum had relocated to Dovecrest in Exeter-where it is currently located- after the death of founder Eva Butler and was rededicated to her memory by Redwing on June 12, 1972.
Thank you for reading and if you remember attending Maple Sugar Thanksgiving at the Tomaquag Museum, please comment below. We’d love to hear your memories!