Exhibits

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Maine State Museum Exhibits

The Maine State Museum shows the best of Maine – all under one roof. From beautiful nature scenes with live trout, to a dramatic three-story working mill, to objects created by Maine’s earliest people, the museum’s exhibits offer something for everyone. Rich in detail and appeal about Maine’s history, environment, and pre-historic past, these in depth exhibits provide new discoveries with each and every visit.

The Maine State Museum is currently closed for substantial repairs. This page describes in brief some of the exhibits you would ordinarily see if you were able to visit. For now, enjoy a remote museum experience: click here to explore our video series

Back to Nature features a stunning walk through Maine’s seasons and environments, each filled with animals, birds, and plants. Stop at Maine Gems to get a look at beautiful mineral specimens exhibited in both their original and faceted forms.

Cabinet of Curiosities shows that natural science specimens were the first collections exhibited when the Maine State Museum began in the 1830s.

Maine Bounty: The People and Resources that Shaped Maine greets visitors with the Lion, its signature 1846 steam locomotive.

Made in Maine, an award-winning exhibition, features a working three-story water-powered woodworking mill. Historical settings, such as a sewing room, blacksmith shop, wool carding mill, and shops for making furniture, shoes, and fishing rods reveal stories of Maine people at work and the amazing variety of products they created.

Struggle for Identity takes visitors back to clashes among French, English, and Native Americans for lands and resources in what is now Maine.

12,000 Years in Maine takes visitors back to the retreat of the last glacier and Clovis or Paleo-Indian culture. The extensive and richly-detailed exhibit shows stone tools and weapons, animal bones, and clay pottery fragments that illuminate what archaeologists have learned about Native American people living in Maine for millennia before Europeans arrived in the 1500s.

Maine State Museum