What holds a community together—across generations, shifting economies, and changing identities?
In this ongoing lecture series, Michael Amico weaves personal narrative, historical research, and architectural observation into a moving meditation on how feeling—expressed through same-sex love, mutual aid, ritual, and art—has held towns communities together. These talks ask us to listen more closely to the buildings, relationships, and emotions that have shaped Waldoboro—and continue to shape its future.
Harriet Haskell: Waldoboro, Maine’s Pioneer in Women's Education and the Power of Same-Sex Love
Born in 1835 across the street from today’s Open House of History, Harriet Haskell grew up surrounded by Waldoboro’s shipbuilders and civic powerbrokers—and became something else entirely: a visionary educator and reformer who helped shape a national movement for women’s education.
In this lecture, Amico revisits Haskell’s remarkable life through the lens of emotional performance and same-sex love—especially 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 not just female seminaries, but the emotional and ethical shape of education itself. Her story reveals how women’s same-sex love formed the emotional backbone of a national movement for reform—one rooted in care, social justice, and purposeful living.
The Art of Community: Architecture, Adaptation, and the Spirit of Civic Life
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 spirit, performance, and mutual aid transformed physical space into emotional infrastructure.
This is not nostalgia. It’s a call to reimagine civic life—not as something to consume, but to create.