Museumology Blog

Which Way Does Time Flow? And What Does it Point To?

I'm putting together a study disc of songs relating to the open road and the rails for our Tramp and Hobo Symposium.

I'm taking my cue from the new Abbe Museum in downtown Bar Harbor, Maine, where a timeline of local indigenous people starts in the present day and moves to a point many centuries ago. I understand the display to see that point in time as not having been left behind.

So I read my tramp and hobo sources starting with one of the newest, a book that includes a lot of oral history taken down decades after widespread hobo-ing came to an end. Then I read memoirs written closer to the golden age of hobo-ing, which ended in 1929. Then I looked at the oldest tramp-related material I could find, stuff from the 1870s and 1880s. The I went out in the backyard and spent an afternoon tearing down a rotted fence.

I hoped I was peeling down through what hoboes were not, to what they were, or are.

I'm arranging my study disc the same way. The first track is the "Hobo's Lullaby," and I'll run back—or inward—to "Lonesome Joe" or something even older.

This way I get out from under letting nostalgia and mellow memories stand as the conclusion to what I've read and heard this spring.

I want the endpoint to be whatever is oldest, meanest, surliest, loneliest, sweatiest.

Maybe the cycle will end with the wail of a train whistle, or the clacking of the wheels, or perhaps the scream of a hobo who has lost hold of a brake beam and fallen to his death on the cinders below. Or the scrape and grunt of a man shoveling coal, or ore, or dirt, for hours on end.

Maybe those sounds should all fall away, and leave only the sound of walking feet, and then only the sound of water flowing.

Drat – I just romanticized all this. Hard not to, really.

—David Hammond

Spikes and It's the Stupid Economy

Winter. End of 2008—The Main Street Museum has seen a signifiant increase in memberships over the last half of 2008. It may be the economy. It may be the stupid economy. People are thinking more locally. And they are definitely supporting the Museum more since this past September. We don't know what it all means.