The museum includes a complex of six historic buildings (five authentic 19th-century structures, one a careful modern reproduction) in which the life and work of 19th-century Acadians is showcased; this complex has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[2] It was originally located in Hamlin, and is believed to be the oldest schoolhouse in the region.

[3] These buildings were not originally located at this site, having been moved from elsewhere in the region by the museum's organizing body, L'Heritage Vivant.

They represent surviving elements of early French-American Acadian culture, which originally settled the area in the 1780s, and remained through a border dispute between Maine and New Brunswick in the first half of the 19th century.

When the border dispute was resolved without bloodshed with the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the Acadian community was divided between the two jurisdictions.