KINGFIELD – The Ski Museum of Maine, a statewide organization devoted to collecting and displaying artifacts connected with the history of the sport and business of skiing in Maine, and honoring those people who have made significant contributions by inducting them into the museum’s Maine Ski Hall of Fame, has announced a collaboration with the Maine Historical Society and its computer-based Maine Memory Network.

A visit to www.maine memory.net will transport the viewer into Maine’s skiing heritage through a display of photographs of Pleasant Mountain in Bridgton during the 1950s and 1960s. That ski area, now known as Shawnee Peak, was the pioneering development in what has become a major industry in the state.

“The Ski Museum, and everyone interested in the history of skiing in Maine, owe a great debt to Scott Andrews, a museum volunteer who assembled the display,” said John Christie, museum president.

The 13 photos comprising the exhibit show the technical developments during the 1950s and 1960s in ski gear, lifts and grooming. Metal, fiberglass and plastic were replacing hickory and leather in the manufacture of skis and boots and safety release bindings were becoming widespread.

“Rope tows were replaced by T-bars and chairlifts as the best way to get up the hill,” said Andrews, “and tracked vehicles … snow cats … began to be used to groom snow surfaces.”

“The net result,” said Andrews, “was that the sport began to attract millions of casual recreationists during those fast-growth decades. A high percentage of those new skiing recruits were women, so the sport was no longer the exclusive domain of athletic young men.”

New recruits to the sport needed to learn to ski, so many ski areas, like Pleasant Mountain, imported Europeans to staff the schools … profoundly changing the culture of the sport.

The collaborative display represents, for the first time, an opportunity for the public to view the results of some of the decade-long work that the museum has been conducting in the gathering and archiving of skiing-related materials.

“The museum’s long-term goal is to have a facility where the public can see, touch and learn about those things that have contributed to the rich heritage of the sport in Maine,” said Christie, “but we feel strongly that Web-based access to those materials will play an integral role in educating people interested in the history of skiing in the state. Toward that end, the collaboration we are announcing today is a major step toward that goal.”

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