Rotary Donation Allows Multipurpose Meeting Room Construction to Begin

The Rotary Club of Newport has donated $50,000 toward the construction of a new community meeting place at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center (PMHC) on Newport’s Bayfront. The Multipurpose Room will be approximately 1,700 square feet, feature custom milled salvaged old growth fir from the Siletz River Mill, and multimedia connectivity for presentations. The space will be used to facilitate museum classes and workshops, and K-12 and adult education programs. It will also be available to rent for community training sessions, workshops, meetings, and programs. It will be located downstairs at the PMHC, adjacent to our Doerfler Family Theater.

In addition to the Rotary Club of Newport, major donors and grant providers include the Roundhouse Foundation, the City of Newport, Georgia Pacific, and many community and in-kind donations. Many thanks to our wonderful Lincoln County community for helping us create this educational space. The beginning stages of construction are underway, and the project is scheduled to be completed in late 2024. Return to our website for future updates on this project!

Photos:

-Above: Members of the Lincoln County Historical Society and the Rotary Club of Newport pose in the future Multipurpose with the $50,000 dollar check.

-Below: Concept images of the Multipurpose Room by architect Serina Adams

The Lincoln County Historical Society welcomes you to the second of our three science talks in conjunction with our new exhibit, Cycles of Nature, which explores how human activity impacts nature and its cycles. This talk will be on Thursday, August 15th at 6pm at the Doerfler Family Theater in the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center .

Ryan Parker will discuss his experience with mitigating marine debris along the Oregon Coast and his efforts to improve the ecosystem by preventing pollution at its various sources. He’s also going to discuss the economic factors that affect plastic waste and infrastructure projects that are being developed to prevent future marine debris from entering the ocean.

Ryan is an environmental advocate who has lived in Lincoln County since 2008 and is employed in natural resources management for the State of Oregon. His project is a personal effort conducted during his free time. His installation Removal of Plastics in the Agate Beach Dune Field- Summer 2021 is on display at Cycles of Nature.

Our final talk in this series will be Thursday, September 12th at 6pm by Dr. Bob Dziak, NOAA Scientist: Echoes beneath the waves: Analysis of human-made and natural ocean sounds for insights into the state of marine ecosystems 

The Lincoln County Historical Society manages the PMHC, the Burrows House Museum, the Log Cabin Research Library, and two artifact storage facilities, all in Newport. We are dedicated to preserving and interpreting the history of the central Oregon coast.

-Photo: Ryan Parker

The Lincoln County Historical Society welcomes you to the first of our three science talks in conjunction with our new exhibit, Cycles of Nature, which explores how human activity impacts nature and its cycles.

The first speaker is Dr. John Chapman who is a faculty member of the Oregon State University, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation. Dr. Chapman’s research over the last 50 years has concerned the unnatural history, biogeography, and ecology of marine biological invasions in estuaries and oceans. He will give a talk about blue mud shrimp and their habitat in Yaquina Bay. This talk will take place in our Doerfler Family Theater at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center in Newport on Thursday, July 25 at 6pm.

“Climate change driven ocean warming causes thermal stress, increased infectious diseases and coral bleaching in the worldwide tropics. Equal and greater alterations of many other marine ecosystems, that are due to climate change, are occurring world-wide but are less visible and thus commonly overlooked. Native northeastern Pacific blue mud shrimp, Upogebia pugettensis, populations of the northeast Pacific maintain a complex burrow gallery ecosystem in intertidal estuary mudflats. The ongoing collapse of these mud shrimp populations, even in Yaquina Bay, along with their cryptic ecosystem is a climate change effect that permitted the introduction of an Asian parasite.”

His resin installation piece of blue mud shrimp burrows is on display at the exhibit Cycles of Nature. This will be a great opportunity to deepen your understanding of the global issue through his work.

Our exhibit, Cycles of Nature, runs to November 3, 2024.

Ernest Bloch Commemoration The Ernest Bloch Legacy Committee of the Lincoln County Historical Society is pleased to present a special program focused on the history of composer Ernest Bloch on Sunday, July 14 at 2 p.m. in the Doerfler Family Theater located in the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center. Dr. Frank Jo Maitland Geltner will be joined by Charmaine Leclair on cello and Dr. Alexander Knapp by Zoom. The main focus will be Ernest Bloch’s Suite No. 1 for solo cello performed by Dr. Charmaine Leclair. Dr. Knapp will share his insights into Bloch’s musical composition. Each year the Ernest Bloch Legacy Committee presents a commemorative program as part of its effort to preserve the legacy of the composer. The cello piece was one Ernest Bloch composed in Agate Beach in 1956, three years before his death.

The Ernest Bloch Sesquicentennial or Bloch 150 will be celebrated in 2030. Efforts are now underway to begin planning for that occasion. While final plans are not yet complete, the one idea that has taken hold is to work towards hosting an international symposium in Agate Beach in the former Bloch residence. More on that in time.

Dr. Geltner will be sharing some excerpts from Dr. David Z. Kushner’s Ernest Bloch Companion, Helen Johnston Kintner’s The Ernest Bloch I Knew, and Suzanne Bloch’s Creative Spirit. Kushner’s book has been the primary source book for those interested in Bloch. Johnston served as Bloch’s personal secretary for the last decade of his life. Suzanne Bloch, the composer’s daughter, who served for over four decades on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, produced Creative Spirit in 1976 in anticipation of the Bloch Centennial in 1980.

The Lincoln County Historical Society will distribute copies of the Ernest Bloch Booklet during this program. An ongoing Ernest Bloch exhibit is on display in the Burrows House Museum.

Dr. Alexander Knapp is a freelance musicologist, ethnomusicologist, lecturer, consultant, teacher, composer and pianist. From the late 1960’s to the present day, Alex has researched, published and lectured extensively in the UK, USA, many parts of Western and Eastern Europe, Israel, Western Russia, Eastern Siberia, and China, on the subject of Jewish music, and especially the work of composer Ernest Bloch. He contributed substantially to a volume entitled Ernest Bloch Studies (2016) that he co-edited for Cambridge University Press. Dr. Knapp will be sharing news from the International Ernest Bloch Society.

Dr. Charmaine Leclair recently retired to Newport, Oregon where several of her relatives have lived for generations. She was appointed as a core member of the cello section of the Newport Symphony by Maestro Adam Flatt in April of 2024. Leclair received her Ph. D. in music history and cello performance from the University of Oregon. For twenty years she lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was a cellist in the Charleston Symphony and the Hilton Head Island Orchestra as well as an orchestra librarian. She volunteers regularly maintaining and forging trails with Trail Keepers of Oregon and Newport Trail Stewards (NEWTS) in designated wilderness areas and parks along the Oregon coast.