On Thursday, June 30, at the Boothbay Region Historical Society, Chris Hoffman will present a program entitled The struggle for the supremacy of the coast: baseball and identity in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.

Hoffman grew up in Harpswell and graduated from Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham in 2003. He graduated from Colby College with a double major in history and German literature and a minor in secondary school teacher certification. He taught social studies briefly at Morse and Wiscasset high schools before he and his wife, Courtney, headed to Salzburg, Austria for a year of teaching as Fulbright Scholars in 2008-2009. From 2008 to 2010, he spent his summers as the activities director for the Ocean Point Colony Trust, a position that helped him become personally familiar with the Boothbay region. Hoffman and his wife live in Brunswick with their two children. He currently teaches English and Social Studies at Greely High School in Cumberland.

Hoffman became interested in the history of the Boothbay region in general when his parents, Sarah Foulger and Russ Hoffman, moved to Boothbay Harbor from Harpswell in 2005. His enrollment in the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, a program rich in its study of the history of Maine, gave him the structure and framework to better explore the history of the Boothbay region. Over the next couple of years he completed several short research projects that brought him to the Boothbay Region Historical Society (BRHS). During one of those visits at BRHS, he stumbled across a photograph of what he later determined was the 1902 Boothbay Harbor baseball team. On the back, the results of the team’s games and the batting averages of the players were listed. That there was one game against Squirrel Island caught his eye. Later, during a trip to Monhegan, he saw a painting that referred to a game between island locals and summer residents, and he wondered if the same social divide existed in baseball games in Boothbay Harbor. As his research eventually told him, it sure did. The more he found, the more he realized that this story needed to be told, and so it became the subject of his master’s thesis at USM, which he completed in 2014 after more than two years of work.

Hoffman will share that story in his program on June 30. This program is free to all and will be held at 4:30 p.m. at the museum, located at 72 Oak Street, Boothbay Harbor. For more information, call 633-0820.

Following a recent change in policy, reservations will no longer be accepted for our programs. Seating, limited to the main room of the museum, will be available on a first come first served basis. The doors will open shortly after 4 p.m.