History Series Offered in Fishertown

The Dunnings Creek Friends Meeting (Quakers) will present the Winter 2024 event in their “Still Listening” guest speaker series on local history on Feb. 25.

Michael Corle of Bedford will present “Changing Narratives: The New Voice of Rural Museums.”

This Still Listening program will be held at the Dunnings Creek Friends Meetinghouse (also known as the Old Brick Quaker Church), located at 285 Old Quaker Church Road, Fishertown, on Sunday, Feb. 25, at 2 p.m. Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served. All are welcome, but seating is limited.

Michael Corle is a designer and educator with 25 years experience in architectural and exhibit design, art and technology education, as well as marketing and brand development. In 2014, Corle was approached by the Bedford Heritage Trust to “reimagine” the 60-year-old Fort Bedford Museum in downtown Bedford. He, along with other museum specialists, began a multi-year process to transform “the Fort” into a more modern museum.

In recent years small museums throughout the country have been finding ways to adapt and become more relevant in the 21st Century by presenting a more complete story of the diverse peoples and events that shaped history. This effort includes many local historic sites, including Bedford Borough’s Fort Bedford Museum, which was built in the 1950s to tell the story of the town’s founding.

The newest exhibits to open at the Fort Bedford Museum are Cave to Empire and The Fort Era. These focus on the wealth of artifacts that tell us about the lives of First Nations people living in this region for thousands of years. Their legacy, left almost exclusively in stone tools collected from creek beds, fields, and excavations for roads and buildings, have been the subject of local hobbyists and amateur historians for decades.

The stories of those indigenous people that have historically been told here have largely been of massacres, kidnappings, and bloody conflict with early colonists. However, Native peoples were affected by increased pressure for lands, international politics, economic challenges, epidemics, and cultural prejudice.

As with any population, indigenous groups and individuals responded to these pressures in different ways. This program will explore more fully some of the stories that have been handed down.

Corle, along with his wife Jade, owned and operated Locality Gallery & Workshop in downtown Bedford for a decade. Corle spent six years assisting with the 2004 expansion of the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

In subsequent years, he worked as a prototype engineer, developing point of purchase display systems for some of the world’s most recognizable brands. Michael has more recently been tasked with developing other small museums in the region including the Fort Ashby Museum, Traveller’s Rest Museum, Mineral County Historical Society, and the Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor.

Corle is currently developing the new Wills Creek Museum on the grounds of the historic Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland.

Email dunningscreekquakers@gmail.com for further information.