Homer Lebel and two of his brothers came to Lewiston in the early 1900s, leaving a family of 14 in Quebec.

"Food and work were very difficult," Homer's grandson Fred Lebel recalls. "They were actually starving and they heard about the [textile] mills."

Homer got a job hauling cotton from the freight yards to the Continental mill. The brothers were 12, 13 and 15 when they arrived.

As a historian and a newcomer to Maine, I am constantly impressed by the power of history here.

Mainers have a deep sense of roots. They cherish the living presence of the past; they worry about losing touch with it in the face of economic and social change.

Yet I am also struck how much of Maine's history is little-known. One of those unsung stories concerns millworkers like Homer Lebel.

From the mid-1800s, milltowns sprang up in a great arc from Biddeford to Millinocket, part of Maine's economic bedrock for more than a century. Yet to a great extent, the history of the millworkers' world remains to be told.

A new traveling exhibit, which opened last Sunday in Lewiston, contributes to that story. "Weaving a World: Lewiston's Millworkers, 1920-2008" describes the mills, millworkers and the social world they made.

Presented by Museum L-A, a fledgling museum of the history of work and community, "Weaving a World" draws on a treasure trove of material: family keepsakes, historic photographs and oral histories like Fred Lebel's. The exhibit is important, moving and surprising.

"Weaving a World" follows Lewiston millworkers from the hard times of the early 20th-century through wartime and prosperity in the 1940s and '50s to the mill closures of recent decades. This roller-coaster ride of struggle, progress and crisis coincided with the lives of the elders interviewed for the exhibit; as a result, "Weaving a World" gives us a front-row seat on history.

Helen Little tells a bittersweet story from the Depression: her mother agreed to let her stay in high school rather than enter the mills at 16 -- but only if she would give up costly piano lessons. Lionel Audet describes military service in World War II as an education in human diversity, exposing him to Americans of all different backgrounds and religions.

Although the exhibit deals with the grand themes of business, politics and wars, it is the human story, the lived experience of momentous times, that comes through most powerfully.

"Weaving a World" offers a picture of the past different from the way Maine's history is often portrayed.

The millworkers' world was not a bastion of "the old ways," timeless and set apart. It was full of tumult, conflict and adaptation, full of connections to the world of national politics, international migration and global economic competition.

The forces of change often created hard times for millworkers, but they were not victims of history. Their technological inventiveness enabled Lewiston's mills to prosper even as those in cities like Lowell, Mass., were declining. Franco-Americans, Irish and other ethnic groups created a rich fabric of communal institutions, even as immigrant families became upwardly mobile.

The millworker community is sometimes seen (by both insiders and outsiders) as insular, defensive and defenseless in the face of change. "Weaving a World" uncovers a different story: one of resilience, tenacity and creativity.

The how of the exhibit is almost as important as the story it tells. For "Weaving a World" is rooted in community collaboration. Museum L-A was established more than 10 years ago as a grass-roots cultural institution; facing the decline of the Lewiston mills and Auburn shoe factories, local historians, retirees and their families sought to preserve a living connection between past and present. They saved looms and lasts from the junkyard; asked elders to share family photographs and keepsakes; and initiated an oral history project to preserve the memories of the millworkers' world.

Bates College partnered with the museum; students produced more than 80 oral histories of retired millworkers and a student-faculty team researched and wrote the traveling exhibit. "Weaving a World," in short, grows out of the same tradition of collective resilience that it describes. It grows out of a conviction that engaging the past helps communities renew themselves in the present.

All this gives "Weaving a World" a value, I believe, beyond the local lore of retired millworkers. It helps to illuminate an important part of the Maine experience; indeed, the traveling exhibit will be seen throughout the state and the region and we hope that it may encourage similar academic-community history partnerships.

The exhibit is on view throughout the summer at Museum L-A's exhibit space in the old Bates Mill No. 2. Come hear Homer Lebel's story and many others. They will astonish you.

David Scobey is a U.S. historian and director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, Bates College, Lewiston. He is the author of "Weaving a World: Lewiston's Millworkers, 1920-2008," and he also serves on the Board of Directors of Museum L-A.