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Outdoor Artifacts Museum Could Start with Porter

January 09, 2008 - SANFORD -- For 28 years, Harold Porter has collected outdoors artifacts. Harold Porter is absolutely right. The sporting public needs some kind of museum dedicated to the outdoors - something that can capture Maines long history of hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, canoeing, snowshoeing and anything else we've long prided ourselves on.

"There ought to be a place that can capture that, a place that can keep it living forever, where our kids and then their kids can go some day to see how dad used to do things. And how his dad used to do things. Yeah, there ought to be a place like that. Because once it's gone, it's gone forever," Porter said.

Well, he ought to know. Porter lives in Sanford and scours the state for artifacts of particular interest to the outdoorsman. A certified Coleman camping equipment collector, Porter had his impressive antique ice fishing collection on display at Jack Traps in Monmouth this past weekend during that store's open house. The collections is 28 years worth of jig rods, ice augers, tip-ups, magazines and pocket warmers - more than 100 items strong, all paid for out of Porter's own pocket, found in his own time.

He's overtumed cardboard boxes at yard sales, picked apart 10-foot-long tables at flea markets and scoured classified ads. Poner has also been one ofthe area's biggest proponents for the creation of a hunting and fishing museum in Maine, and the idea has lots of merit. But he said he's met with road blocks at every proverbial turn along the path.

According to Porter, the state museum in Augusta only has enough money currently to pay for operations - building maintenance and repairs, staff salaries and utility costs. Any acquisition of an exhibit, in part or as a whole, must come from private donations.

Porter also said he's contacted people at L.L. Bean, asking them to consider the inclusion of a hunting and fishing museum with the 700-acre outdoor adventure "theme park" they are currently in the process of constructing. He said that suggestion was met largely by indifference.

Porter's concems are simple. "People are getting older," Porter said. "When they go, their collections are gone, too. People come in and see the stuff and don't think it's worth anything, and then they'll just throw it out. "Gone - gone forever."

We Mainers are proud of our traditions. We're proud to stand out on a frozen lake in the dead of winter, braving sub-freezing temperatures in the howling wind, for the right to hoist a 6-pound lake trout. We're proud of the 1,200-pound moose we harvest during the state's annual moose hunt, one we drag out of the woods ourselves. We're proud of all the different opportunities we offer - climbing Mount Katahdin, canoeing the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, tenting out in Baxter State Park. But we're equally proud of the chance to showcase such things, as Porter does with his Coleman and ice fishing collections.

A museum would not only serve those of us who live here, but it would also serve as a tremendous tourism opportunity. Imagine a place that ignites the imagination and rattles our memories... Giant murals created from original photographs of a stay in a traditional deer camp. Antique guns in pristine display cases. Interactive exhibits with traditional rawhide snowshoes. The clothes, the hats, the smiles. Now imagine all of the people who have hunted and fished in Maine, all of the people whose parents and grand- parents hunted and fished in Maine. And imagine all of them making a trip with their sons and daughters to see what it used to be like here - stopping at a museum on the way to a hunting trip of their own or when retuming from a week in the family's fishing cabin on some pond loaded with wild brook trout in northern Maine.

Harold Porter can imagine it, and it's why he's frustrated that not everyone else can see it, too. After all, he's seen how hard It can he to get your hands on historic artifacts of life gone by, and he knows that if there were a place people could save those said artifacts forever, it would only serve the greater good.

"We really ought to do something," Porter says, and he's absolutely right.

SOURCE: MORNING SENTINEL

DATE: 12-19-2007


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