Museums - Abbe Museum

The Abbe Museum was founded in 1928 by eminent New York physician Dr. Robert Abbe as a privately operated trailside museum in Acadia National Park, dedicated to the Native American archaeology of Maine. Its collections soon expanded to include ethnographic and, later, contemporary Maine Native American objects. In 2001 the Abbe expanded into an additional and significantly larger museum in downtown Bar Harbor, with multiple exhibition galleries, areas for educational programs, and space for collections research and storage.
The Abbe collection consists entirely of Native American material, primarily from Maine and the Canadian Maritimes, and is the world’s largest single collection of Maine Native American material. The collection numbers approximately 35,000 objects, of which the great majority are archaeological artifacts supporting research and interpretation of 12,000 years of Native American presence in Maine, acquired over the last seventy-five years through donations and scientific excavations. The museum also has more than 1,500 Native American baskets, both historic and contemporary, and other examples of traditional objects such as birchbark containers, beadwork, porcupine quill boxes, clothing, and carved root clubs. This important collection was compiled through donations by Mary Cabot Wheelwright, Watie Akins, Anne Molloy Howells, Diana J. Baker, C. Gardner Lane, Dr. Isaac W. Kingsbury, Ned Jalbert, and many others, as well as through purchases.
The historic and contemporary basket collection may well be the largest, best documented Northeastern basketry collection in any museum. It includes early nineteenth-century examples of woven and hand-swabbed storage baskets (band boxes) that date to the earliest period of basketry production among Penobscot weavers. There are several coherent collections of late nineteenth-century fancy baskets, emblematic of the explosion of the art-for-sale movement among Native Americans at that time. The etched birchbark collection includes very early nineteenth-century work by Penobscot and Passamaquoddy artists, signed pieces by Tomah Joseph, and many pieces of Micmac quill embroidery on birchbark. Finally, the contemporary collection, with pieces by well-known active and recent Wabanaki weavers, interprets the recent movement of basketry as fine art.