Brick Store Museum – $10,000

This grant supports the Brick Store Museum, which was founded in 1936 and is housed in a landmark 1825 general store and four adjacent early 19th-century buildings in Kennebunk, Maine, as it embarks on a transformative project to expand upon the one-man narrative of the town's history that grew in the mid-20th century and seeks to more fully reflect the diversity and complexity of southern Maine. The museum will reinterpret its primary gallery to explore early American life during the period 1780-1830 from the perspectives of former enslaved persons that settled in the area in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a local woman who founded a business to support her family in the aftermath of the War of 1812, and three Indigenous communities that inhabited and stewarded the land for centuries before the town was founded. These exhibits will invite visitors to reconsider what early American history looked like—and who it included.