Every community has its stories, its sacred places, its special people - and here we have a place to make sure nothing is forgotten.
EXHIBIT DESIGN: Main Gallery Exhibition
The principal exhibit space at the museum will serve as a preview to the communities of Down East Carteret County past and present. This area includes the main exhibition, an information desk area, library, public archive reading room for oral histories and a museum gallery featuring the work of local artists, carvers and writers, and supplemented by the second floor mezzanine dedicated to the interpretation of community by community displays featuring artifacts, photographs and audiovisual presentations.
In the information desk area near the main entrance, visitors will be introduced to the museum as a preview of their visit Down East. The downstairs gallery, along with the community exhibits on the second floor, will give visitors a broad understanding of the interconnectedness between the land and the water, the people and the place and the rich heritage that continues to be the lifeblood of the people of Down East. The museum also serves as the southern entrance to the Outer Banks Scenic Byway that runs through all of Down East Carteret County to the Cedar Island-Ocracoke ferry across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Island. From there the Byway runs northward across Hatteras Inlet and up the famed Outer Banks to Whalebone Junction. This anticipated national Scenic Byway will provide much needed promotional support to the museum and the local economy that seeks out the growing number of heritage/cultural/eco- travelers looking for places like Down East Carteret County.
The main floor exhibits will be organized according to four principal traditions which illuminate Core Sound culture. Each topic is centered on a building, room, or location which can be represented in object-rich and furnishings-based exhibits. These places and their associated activities might include (but are not limited to):
Exhibits in these areas will be “immersive” in style. Exhibits will be experiential where, for example, the visitor will enter a decoy carver’s shop or walk into a cutaway of a boatbuilding shop. Furnishings will be supplemented with other interpretive media such as reader-rail panels, tactile models, life-size figures, labels, audio messages, and interactive exhibit elements. Exhibits will include artifacts as well as reproductions and models which can be touched or manipulated. In some cases, spaces will be designed so that interpreters may use those spaces for demonstrating skills such as carving or quilting.
In general, the main gallery exhibits are intended to interpret the Core Sound region as a whole and its connections (physical and cultural) one to the other and to the mainland. The role of transportation and communication (past and present) will be explored in the community store- post office section. The importance of watercraft will be examined in the boatbuilding and commercial fishing areas. The history of market hunting and Core Sound’s connection to the railroad for transporting fish and fowl to northern markets in the early 1900s will be of interest to travelers unaware of the great challenges of the past.
Although the focus of the exhibition is the people’s story, past and present and their adaptation to change over the past 100+ years, it will also present the natural world which shaped the traditions and culture of the area.
The storyline within each section will follow a seasonal organization of exhibitions and interpretations, so that the natural environments will form the backdrops for the various locations and activities depicted. The role of the natural world (including geography, weather, natural science) in this evolving culture will be a constant message. Further, the CSWM&HC exhibit committee will seek creative ways to keep the context of place evident throughout.
Some exhibits will feature interior scenes that contain many small objects. Other exhibits may be based on a large object, such as a restored work boat, which serves as a nucleus for the exhibit experience. While the exhibits may contain many material objects, it is anticipated that the exhibits will elicit much of their appeal from the portrayal of human experiences through labels, audio, or video based on the experiences of the people of Core Sound. The CSWM has a rich collection of oral histories, documents, and diaries, and it also has continuing contacts with people who have intimate knowledge of the subjects being interpreted.
For the most part, the second floor space will be reserved for changing displays interpreting individual communities in the Core Sound area. Approximately fourteen (14) separate communities will be represented and interpreted individually and collectively. These fourteen communities will have its own community banner, exhibit panels, and/or other element which will identify that community’s role in Core Sound history.
The community exhibits will consist of artifacts, reproductions, photographs, scrapbooks, copies of archival documents, audio messages, cell phone messages, and/or other media which interpret community life and history. The content for these informal displays and interpretive materials will be produced primarily by the community subject experts and representatives, and will be maintained and revised by museum staff as needed.
The second floor opening to the gallery below also offers an opportunity for audiovisual programming. Three sides of the opening are open to the floor below, but the fourth side which adjoins the elevator shaft forms a wall which extends to the exposed-beam ceiling of the second floor. This space may be used for a projection screen which will be visible to visitors optimally from the second floor space opposite the screen, but also from the side railings of the mezzanine, and from selected vantage points in the gallery below.
The CSWM&HC realizes that the human stories of Core Sound can be powerfully portrayed using documentary film techniques. The CSWM&HC intends to develop a principal short film for presentation in this area. The plan for this documentary presentation is to tell the story of these Core Sound communities and their traditions in a way that would reflect the connection between these locations and the natural world, the seasons, the past and the future, and to do that via the constant resource that connections them -- the waters that surround them.
Because now most visitors come to this region by roads and bridges, we propose this documentary to be from a water-perspective. Much like locals and visitors alike reached this area by boat before the 1940s and 50s, this presentation would be told from aboard a mix of workboats of yesterday, passenger ferries of today and from the stories of men and women who actually rode the mailboat to the doctor, hauled freight up on local docks and worked in the fishhouses where trucks were packed nightly for markets north and south. It is the simple reality that this area’s history and its future depend on its relationship to the mainland across bridges and roads and via boats and ferries. The geography of this region continues to be what determines both its beauty and its challenge.
It would be the goal of this documentary film to incorporate visual experiences of the cultural traditions and natural scenic places along with the voices of the people in such a way that visitors (both local and traveling) would have a true “Core Sound” experience that reflects the living maritime history of coastal North Carolina.