RANGELEY – Rangeley’s three museums will each hold an open house from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday, June 29. The event is offered free of charge and all are welcome to visit and enjoy these special places.

Rangeley Lakes Region Historical Society located on Main Street is on the National Register of Historic Places and contains artifacts and records pertaining to the era of sporting camps and big hotels, fishing, hunting, logging and railroads.

A unique bird egg collection is a featured display and there is an assortment of books and maps of the area.

The Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum on Route 16 one mile east of Rangeley celebrates the lumbering heritage of the western Maine mountains.

It exhibits Alden Grant’s paintings of logging in Kennebago in the late 1920s; the traditional carvings of local woodsmen William Richard, Rodney Richard, Rodney Richard Jr. and Carl Trafton; 1912 to 1940 photographs by Alan Fraser on operations around the Richardson Lake area; Dr. Donald Bowenn’s journal of doctoring in the Brown Co.’s Magalloway camps in the early 1940s; knitting in the lumber camps; a collection of woods equipment, including Elijah Tiger White’s forerunner of the skidder, John C. Tyler’s half-size model sled, donkey engines, snubbing machines, pulp conveyors and over 70 early chainsaws.

The Wilhelm Reich Museum, home of one of the 20th Century’s most controversial figures, Austrian-born physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich, is located on Dodge Pond Road between Rangeley and Oquossoc.

It is an historic site and nature preserve comprising 175 acres of fields and woodland, a system of trails, a Conference Center and The Orgone Energy Observatory, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Visitors may enjoy a biographical video about Reich, tour the building to view Reich’s inventions and equipment, his study, library, sculpture, vivid paintings, as well as his personal memorabilia. Children can explore a hands-on Discovery Room.

The Observatory roof provides spectacular vistas of the region’s open skies, lakes and surrounding countryside. Reich’s tomb, with its dramatic bronze portrait bust, is in a forest clearing nearby.


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