How do buildings—used, abandoned, or repurposed—reflect a town’s emotional life? In this lecture, Amico traces Waldoboro’s civic and cultural history through its architecture, revealing how everyday artistry and adaptive reuse have long helped hold the community together.

From the federal rigidity of the Custom House to the experimental, mixed-use designs of 19th-century buildings like Clark’s Hall and Sproul Block, both with performance halls, the talk maps the emotional terrain of Waldoboro’s built environment. We journey through Masonic lodges, Grange Halls, the Star Theatre, and the twentieth-century modernism of the Waldo Theatre, witnessing how a spirit of mutual aid created the emotional infrastructure of community calling out for a renewed built environment today.

Born in 1835, Harriet Haskell grew up surrounded by Waldoboro’s shipbuilders and powerbrokers and became something else entirely: a visionary educator who helped shape a national movement for women’s education.

In this lecture, Amico revisits Haskell’s remarkable life through the lens of same-sex love and feeling—particularly her 55-year partnership with Emily Gilmore Alden, who wrote the biography from which much of this story is drawn. More than a tale of local success, Haskell’s life exemplifies a queer sensibility that helped define the ethical shape of education in female seminaries. Her history reveals how women’s same-sex love formed the emotional backbone of a national movement for social reform rooted in care, justice, and purposeful living.