Proposed Programming and Exhibits at the Cultural Heritage Center

DHPT’s plans for the property will result in a potential tourist destination where visitors to the Elihu Akin House Cultural Heritage Center will be given a multifaceted experience.  Here’s a look at some of the exciting new exhibits and programming proposed for the new facility:

• Architecture of the House:  A visual post and beam cape structure built in 1762 by a yeoman. The influences of methods passed down through generations.  How to conserve a structure and how to look for the story of a house as it changes.
• Akin History: The CHC will tell the story of those who lived in the Akin house since it was built through exhibits and interpretive displays of cultural, economic, and social changes, photographs, oral and written histories.
• Site Study: Exhibits will portray the historical context of the landscape in relation to the house (roads, outbuildings, orchards, gardens, surrounding farmland).
• Archaeology: Workshops and exhibits will show relationships between lifestyle and artifacts (outbuildings, foundations, pottery shards, iron instruments, tools, and personal belongings).
• Genealogy: Workshops will inspire visitors to learn about the life of a house from documents such as deeds, wills, and other archival sources.
• Community History: Explore farming, fishing, shipbuilding, entrepreneurship and other forms of economic development of both pre-contact and contact groups from colonial days to the present.
• Historic Context through Maps, Ancient Drawings, and GIS:  Display centuries of change in old Dartmouth–– shelters, landscape and streetscapes, through division of land, plans realized by early to later landowners, changes in population and density.