Adopt your town. Our partners at the Penobscot Marine Museum have lots of priceless Maine negatives in need of a home at the museum. The Maine Coast Welcome Center has proudly adopted Belfast.

From Kevin the museums photo archivist:

Dear Friends and supporters,

I am writing to you all today as you have expressed interest at one time or another in the photography collections at the Penobscot Marine Museum. As most of you know, we have been working the past few years on tracking down and acquiring the negatives from the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. collection that "escaped" in the decades before the bulk of the collection was donated to the museum in 2007. Through donations and purchases, we have been able to reunite nearly 5000 of the negatives back to the collection. We now have the opportunity to acquire 7,500 more of the negatives! The acquisition will bring the museum a huge step closer to completing this important collection of photographs from the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company. We need help in making this happen and are currently seeking donations from individuals and local businesses to help it purchase the collection.

Founded in Belfast, Maine, in 1909, the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. published "real photo postcards" with images taken by its own photographers throughout New England. The negatives, mostly on old-style glass plates, represent a fragile and irreplaceable record of the region's physical and cultural history up to the early 1950s. The Eastern collection is one of the largest and most significant coherent collections of historic photography from this region and era and is a valuable resource for educators, historians, genealogists, and anyone interested in New England history. Currently the collection contains more than 40,000 negatives. The museum is scanning them with the help of volunteers and our goal is to get all of these images online for everyone to enjoy and we are working to make that happen later this year. You can learn more about Eastern Illustrating, see an index of the states and towns represented in the collection and see some of the images on our website: http://www.penobscotmarinemuseum.org/photo-collections/eip.html

The museum has already received pledges for approximately half the funds needed to acquire the collection, which documents more than 230 cities, towns and villages in Maine, as well as towns in other northeast states. Click here to download an index of the Maine towns and the number of negatives from each that are contained in group we hope to purchase. We do not yet have an index for the non-Maine negatives but negatives from throughout New England and upstate New York are included. Individuals and businesses can "adopt" a town for a donation of $10 per negative. The towns of Blue Hill, Castine, Dark Harbor, Mouse Island, Bolsters Mill, Belfast and Albany have been adopted already.