As you travel around Brandon over the next few months, you might notice paint cans with the Brandon Museum's logo placed in various locations. These cans are collection points in the Museum's 2026 drive to raise funds for long-needed repairs to the Museum's historic building.
The Brandon Museum is housed in the Stephen A. Douglas Birthplace and Welcome Center on Grove Street, next to the Baptist Church. The Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit run by an unpaid Board of Directors, unpaid volunteers, and a paid steward. We maintain the historic building, which includes the Chamber of Commerce's Brandon's Welcome Center for visitors to town. So, in addition to educating the community about local history through exhibits and programs, we provide information to visitors looking for things to do in the Brandon area. We also have one of the few public restrooms in Brandon, open to the public all year, even when the Museum itself is closed for the winter.
But like any two-hundred-year-old building, the Museum needs regular repairs. Right now, we need to replace rotted wood on the exterior of the house, repaint the entire structure, fix our fence, regrade our parking lot, and repair the slate roof, among many smaller projects. We manage to do a lot of work with volunteer labor and materials, but some repairs must be done by professionals and the expense is often beyond our means. We seek grants whenever possible, but the costs still exceed our available resources.
So we're using the paint cans as a symbol of our efforts to keep this important piece of Brandon history in good repair. Each can has a slot in its lid for much-needed and much-appreciated donations.
The cans have been placed at these locations:
Brandon Museum
Ace Hardware
802 Spirits
The Bookstore
Brandon House of Pizza
Town Hall (downstairs lobby)
Red Clover Ale Company
Morningside Bakery
Center Street Bar
Bar Harbor Bank
Brandon Inn
22 Park Eatery
Brandon Free Public Library
American Legion
Thank you to these establishments for helping us raise funds.
The cans will be out until October 12. Please consider making a donation when you see one. And please stop by the Museum if you haven't already been. We're open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and 1:30 to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, from May through October. Admission is free (as are our programs). We'd love to share our enthusiasm for Brandon, its people, and its history with you.
