NEW GLOUCESTER — The New Gloucester Historical Society will launch its newest exhibit, New Gloucester From Then ‘Til Now, at 9 a.m. Saturday, June 2 at the History Barn in Lower Gloucester.
The exhibit profiles 11 neighborhoods.
The idea for the exhibit came from a prize-winning paper written by Eleanor Margaret Clark Curit of the class of 1935 at New Gloucester High School.
Beverly Cadigan, president of the Historical Society, said teams of 11 volunteers worked on profiling 11 neighborhoods in New Gloucester. Eleanor lived at 1159 Intervale Road with her parents, S. Clifton Clark and Mary E.W. Clark. She gathered information for her 16-page paper by interviewing elderly people living on the Penny Road, Morse Road and surrounding area with the help of her father.
“New Gloucester, historically speaking, is one of the most fascinating towns in Maine,” Eleanor wrote. “It has been formed by a frontier post because it was a town through which immigrants to all sections in the middle and north of our state traveled in order to reach their chosen place of settlement. This fact probably partly explains there being a great number of taverns in New Gloucester.”
After graduation from Bates College in Lewiston, Eleanor taught high school on Chebeague Island. Later she and her husband, Walter Curit, and their daughter Margaret moved to Portland where she was employed by Maine Savings Bank, according to the research of Jean Libby of the New Gloucester Historical Society.
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