Tonight on New Hampshire Crossroads, we visit the most eclectic museum in New Hampshire: the Woodman Institute in Dover.

Then we meet a person who maintains a bit of France right here in New Hampshire.

Portsmouth musician and songwriter Lucie Therrien.

And we travel to Hillsborough and meet Ray Gibson, a teacher, writer, former minister, who now fashions pewter by spinning it.

Hi, I'm Fritz Wetherbee, and this is Hampshire Crossroads.

Theme Music New Hampshire Crossroads is underwritten in part by First NH Bank, serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

Clarion Somerset Hotel and Apartments of Nashua, New Hampshire, where we make living fun.

And Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Hampshire.

For over 50 years, dedicated to providing quality health benefit protection programs for employers, employees and individuals.

Today we're on Central Avenue over in Dover, New Hampshire, in front of the Woodman Institute.

And the Woodman Institute is the subject of our first story on Crossroads tonight.

On the 7th of January, 1915, Mrs.

Annie E. Woodman, widow of the late Charles Woodman, an estimable lady of Dover, passed to a higher life.

Five days later her will was made public.

In this document, the citizens read with surprise and pleasure the following: I give and bequeath the sum of $100,000 for the establishment in Dover of an institution for the promotion of education in science and art, and the increase and dissemination of general, and especially historical, knowledge.

Such organization shall be organized as a corporation known as the Annie E. Woodman Institute.

And thus was founded the most eclectic and, some think, the most fascinating museum in New Hampshire, the Woodman Institute.

Music It's really not a 20th century museum.

It's more of a 19th century museum.

20th century museum will take one item and set it up and make a special display of it where we are perhaps a little crowded, but I think it's great to maintain a 19th century museum rather than a 20th century museum.

This is Bob Whitehouse and Raul Kutcher.

Bob is an historian and writer and trustee of the Woodman Institute.

Raul is the institute curator.

Some person’s treasure could be someone else's piece of junk, so we have to be careful what we take in.

What we do accept, we make sure that we display.

That's a fact.

Everything the Institute has is out for all to see.

This polar bear was shot by Dover sportsman Dick Mathis.

Mr.

Mathis is also responsible for a couple of other spectacular specimens.

You'll take a look over here.

You'll see the large Alaskan moose and the wolf.

When Dick shot this animal, he realized that it had left the pack.

It was very old, and he knew that it was just a matter of time before he would, be the demise of him.

So I think that was one of the reasons that he felt it was perhaps all right to shoot it.

Music Where would you go to see a manatee?

You would see it in Florida, but you also can see a manatee at the Woodman Institute.

And this manatee, how it got here, it surely didn't come up by by itself.

And so the manatee is quite unique.

I'm going to name your manatee for you.

That would be - We're going to call him Hubert.

Hubert?

Yup, cause he looks like Hubert Humphrey.

Yeah.

And, then we can call him Hugh Manatee.

Music These bobcats were shot by my grandfather, Martin Whitehouse.

He ran a store very close to here on Tuttle Square and was a very close friend to Mr.

Smith.

He shot these in the New Hampshire woods, or - In the New Hampshire woods.

I didn't know they had bobcats.

Oh, yeah.

The New Hampshire woods.

When would, when would that have been, Bob?

Oh, that would have been 60, 70 years ago.

Music This is a blue shark that is 12ft long.

And it was caught off Ogunquit, Maine back in 1963.

Then we have a 27 pound lobster that was caught off the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery.

In colonial times, lobsters were four feet across.

And this surprised me.

But in the early records, back in the colonial days, there were huge lobsters and they were as much as four feet across in Maine.

Music The four legged chicken is, of course, a great favorite of the many children that come to the Woodman Institute.

And, it was kind of unique.

Music And here lies a specimen that is no longer with us.

The passenger pigeon is now extinct.

This particular room has many birds of distant areas of the, in the States, and some of the birds that you might find in Florida and other locations.

And I think probably the outstanding one is the big bird here that looks like a turkey but isn't.

And I believe it's a condor.

Music This is President Lincoln’s saddle, used by the president at a review of the Union troops in Washington, D.C.

a few weeks before his assassination.

Music Here, on the third floor of the Woodman manse, is as fine a collection of Civil War items as exists in New Hampshire.

And in another room, items from World War II, World War I, and the Spanish-American War.

And frankly, we have only scratched the surface of this remarkable place.

Suffice to say that here are also Indian artifacts, reptile displays, a gallery, a research library, and what has been called the finest rock and mineral collection north of Harvard College.

And we have only visited one building.

There are two others.

Next door is the John Parker Hale House, a repository for historical artifacts and period furniture and paintings.

And between the two main buildings, under a protective roof, is a perfectly preserved and furnished garrison house built in 1675.

But these are other stories for other times, stories of one of the most remarkable places in New England, the Woodman Institute.

In the winter time, the Woodman Institute is open only on Saturday afternoons from 2:00 until 5:00, but it sure is worth a trip over here to see the place on a Saturday afternoon, or they will open it by appointment any time.

So.

And Robert Whitehouse, who you saw in that piece, along with Kathleen Bolton, who is an assistant librarian here in Dover, has written this fabulous city history, which I have read.

And I'm here to tell you, this is as readable as any history I have ever read.

This is a very exciting, wonderful book, and it's for sale here at the Institute.

This house, by the way, is the John Hale House, which is next door to the Woodman House.

And we will be doing a special feature on this house sometime this coming year.

Our next story is about a bit of France here in the United States, in fact, in Portsmouth.

It's the story of Lucie Therrien and who is a singer, songwriter, musician, artist who grew up in Quebec and the United States, attended French and American schools.

And Lucie has dedicated her life to the preservation and the spreading of the history of the French migration to Canada and the United States.

Music Mémère, please explain why I talk in English and you always answer in French?

Tu vois, she explained, (singing in french) I ask the children, in the classes where we're concluding that class, how many were Franco-American and nobody answered.

I knew that wasn't true.

It was a very French town.

And I said, well, how many of you have French names?

Last names?

And nobody seemed to answer again.

And finally I said, how many of you call your grandmother Mémère?

And all these little hands came up?

So it really gave a picture of the generation gap there.

And I wrote a song called Mémère Mémère Please explain to me.

Mémère tell me again, Mémère.

Mémère Music One, two, three One, two three Bonjour.

(speaking in French) Music (repeating one, two, three ) I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was very young, especially in the summers.

And we used to very easily slip back and forth across the border to shop in Newport, Vermont.

And we'd be back home within, you know, 15 minutes.

And, I skied there.

And eventually, as a teenager, I liked the American look of jeans and sneakers.

So I would we'd come across and shop in Newport, Vermont and buy some of those, and I'd come back to Quebec and thought I looked very cool because we had uniforms in schools, and it was much more formal dress.

While I was listening to my dad's fiddling, which went on from childhood, at the time I was a child or a baby.

I also was listening to American Hit Parade, (speaking in French) I was studying classical piano, and my mother always made sure that we learned English folk songs, too.

Each region has its own style of fiddling.

In Quebec, the fiddler sits and clogs or dances with his feet while he plays.

That's the way my papa plays.

Music Besides writing Franco-American music and performing music from several francophone cultures, Lucie Therrien also knows where her music comes from.

At the beginning of it all started in an area of Canada that's called Acadia, and Jacques Cartier arrived from France.

Now, it's an area that nowadays is the Nova Scotia province of Canada.

It had been named Acadia by the Indians.

And because their music came from Brittany, France, it had a Celtic ring to it.

And the Acadians also merged very well with the Indians and some of their, the cross culturing happened in their music and they, you can hear that in some of their earlier arrangements.

In fact, this next song, which is called Le Grain de Mil, a grain of millet, which is a grain that you made bread with, kept a lot of that cross-cultural in it.

I’ll just do the chorus part, (singing in French) During the 1600s, more French settlers poured into Canada and began to populate Quebec and the cities like Montreal and Quebec City, and from their music would develop a culture of music known as Québécois.

(singing in French) Yet another culture of music developed in the 1700s, when the English deported the Acadians and many of them ended up in Louisiana, where they would become the Cajuns.

Now so well-known for their style of music.

(singing in French) This is a traditional Cajun song from Lafayette, Louisiana, which celebrates their version of Mardi Gras in the medieval fashion, similar to the way it is still celebrated in Chéticamp, Nova Scotia.

(singing in French) Music With the more recent migration of French Canadians into New England, the beginnings of yet another form of music is just developing, as the Québécois music collides with the American music to become Franco-American music.

This is the genre Lucie Therrien calls her own.

(singing in French) This song is called Cousins.

It's an original Franco-American song written by Lucie and performed on her latest video.

(singing in French) Lucie has even experimented with rap.

Here's one called Hyper.

(rapping in French) That's my grandmother.

And probably in her I would say early 20s.

(inaudible) She was a dressmaker.

She went to school as a dressmaker.

And, what I remember mostly about her, she was very talented.

She could do so many things.

She could make your clothes, or she could play music for you.

She could do artistic things.

And we were so close that when I would come back from a trip or something, we would usually sit by the kerosene lamp in the dining room, and she would want me to recount my trip day for day and hour for hour.

And she would take notes so she could relive it.

Any culture that is threatened with being assimilated with the culture that's heavier and bigger around them, you have to hang on for dear life.

Music Along with her videos and recordings, Lucie also does residencies in schools and, of course, concerts here in the United States, and also in France.

And if you'd like to see Lucie, she will be appearing at Mardi Gras in Portsmouth on February 27th at the Unitarian Church.

This is pewter.

It's 90% tin, 2% copper, 8% antimony.

It is an alloy.

And our next story is about a man who himself might be considered an alloy.

His name is Ray Gibson and he is part writer, part teacher, part craftsman, retired minister.

And he works in pewter.

And last fall, Crossroads videographer Steve Salniker caught up with Ray at his pewter workshop over in Hillsborough.

Music I believe that we are all made with a heart, head, and hands.

And we are a complete human being.

if we can find some ways to utilize all three dimensions of our lives.

And my scholarship uses my head, and my pastoral ministry used my heart, and my pewter and my weaving and woodworking and various crafts, but pewter preeminently, has been a wonderful, wonderful use of the hands.

Music The following is an excerpt from a book in progress called Tales from the Pewter Shop.

I stand facing the lathe, on which a six inch disk of pewter is spinning.

It's somewhere around 2000 revolutions a minute.

What I'm about to do resembles a potter throwing a pot, forming an object as the clay turns on the wheel.

(sound of spinning lathe) But for me, there's a highly polished steel tool between my hands and the turning metal.

But once the progress begins, I'm in touch with the metal as the beaker is formed from a flat piece of pewter.

For both our crafts, there is the beauty and wonder of something taking shape as it turns.

Within an hour, I hold a finished beaker in my hands.

An object that is new in the world, but with the proper use and care, will be just as useful and even more beautiful 100 years from now.

Music You cannot be interested in pewter without being interested in its history.

And in studying the history, I, there are certain parts of it that I really wanted to preserve if I could.

And so when my children worked with me in the shop as they were going through prep school and college, and after, we developed a mixture of our own pieces and traditional pieces, porringers from the revolutionary period, chamber sticks from the 1800s, and plates from the 1800s and whatnot.

And then as my own children went on with their professional lives, there were young people in the community, and I started asking them to come in.

And even there was an overlap.

While I still had my children working with me, there were some of the children, their friends in the community, that worked in the shop part time.

And then gradually I began just taking apprentices from the Hillsborough community.

And I've had, oh, 7 or 8.

Music England's prestigious Pewterers Guild recognizes only two American pewter smiths.

Ray is one of them, and his 40 years in the ministry still influence his work.

This chalice design took three years to fashion, and has been given as a ceremonial gift to religious leaders around the world.

The unique wood grain in this child's cup attracted the attention of a curator from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

An example now resides in their permanent collection.

A friend of mine took two of my pewter hearts.

He went off to India.

He was speaking all around the country, wherever he went.

He said to those gathered, I want to take something of you back to America with me.

And he passed out the hearts, and everyone was invited to touch them.

When he came home, he brought them back, handed me one and said, Ray, this heart you can have.

It has been touched by 5,000 hands.

Music Ray has just published this book entitled Ministry Recalled, which traces his pastoral experiences over the past 30 years, including his very active participation in the Civil Rights movement.

And Ray would like to remind you that, yes, his shop is open to the general public over there in Hillsborough.

But please, he says, give him a call beforehand if you're coming by.

Well, thank you for joining us.

Next week, we travel up to Wonalancet, near Tamworth, New Hampshire.

Wonalancet was, at one time, the dog sled capital of the world.

Until then, for New Hampshire Crossroads, I'm Fritz Wetherbee Now what is this stuff used for?

Pounding maize and that - Oh, these are, these are mostly tomahawk heads here that we're looking at.

These would be different tools that would be used by the Indians.

Some of them would be for pounding corn and so forth, some of as primitive hatchets or axes.

And arrowheads were, of course, of flint.

And these here were more of stone.

Theme Music You can see, two parts of a buckskin clothing over here in this corner here that is kind of interesting.

Now, are these Indians from from locally around here or are these Western - No, these would probably be Western Indians.

The Indians around here, that the artifacts from them would be so be over 300 years ago, and not likely that too many of the artifacts are from, maybe some.

And, I'm sure we have some that are from this area.

Cloth and leather doesn't last like - Probably not.

Yeah, yeah.

Theme Music New Hampshire Crossroads is underwritten in part by First NH Bank, serving the financial needs of individuals, corporations, and local governments throughout New Hampshire.

Clarion Somerset Hotel and Apartments of Nashua, New Hampshire, where we make living fun.

And Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Hampshire.

For over 50 years, dedicated to providing quality health benefit protection programs for employers, employees, and individuals.

Theme Music