Shelburne Museum, Day 2

Thursday, August 20, 2009

After another hot and humid night (we are amazed that we've had to run the AC almost constantly), the temperature seems to have dropped a little bit. However, it is no longer quite as consistently sunny, and it looks as if we might get some rain sometime soon. The Shelburne Museum is not ideal in the rain, since it's necessary to walk outside between buildings, but it's nice to have less heat, so we didn't complain.

We drove back to the Museum and went in around 11:00. This time we headed in the opposite direction from the day before. We began with a small log building (built recently on the museum grounds) which contained both photographs and paintings of Alaskan scenes. The photos in particular were interesting. We then skipped the next building, which was devoted to sport hunting--not our "thing". Instead we went to a group of buildings with a railroad theme. A section of covered siding included several very old steam engines and some small, 3-wheeled hand-powered railroad carts (they looked as if they ought to be used in a Warner Brothers cartoon--we pictured Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny down the tracks in these cars!) Next door was a huge steam locomotive, and--our favorite--the Grand Isle, the private luxury car of Vermont's governor, and a wonderful example of "Gilded Age" rail travel! Of course we could walk through it--we considered it a fine alternative to our RV, although we do love Mo.



Adjacent to the tracks was the original Shelburne railway station, which had been moved from it's previous location to the museum grounds. Inside was a complete set-up of the telegraph and railway station as it had been 100 75 or 80 years ago.
From there, we went to the Ticonderoga. I mentioned in yesterday's post about how "the Ti" was moved from Shelburne Harbor to the museum. Electra Webb was talked into buying the boat when it was operating at a loss and was going to be destroyed. It was truly a unique feat of engineering to bring the boat overland to the museum grounds. It took about 2 months, and had to be done during the winter, when the ground was frozen hard enough to hold its huge weight. A video on the boat tells the entire story, and scrapbooks nearby show photos taken by local photographers (both on the ground and from the air) as the ship slowly made its way across two miles of roads, even crossing the railroad tracks which run next to the museum grounds. The boat itself is, of course, very elegant and it certainly must have been a memorable trip up Lake Champlain. It was quite amusing to us, however, to sit on the deck chairs and look out over the green grass and buildngs of the Shelburne Museum which now surround the Ti.
Nearby, to keep the ship from coming aground (ha ha!) is a lighthouse, built in 1871. Currently it contains a collection of work by modern folk artist Warren Kimble. We really enjoyed his work! By this time it was around 1:00 and we went back out to the RV for some lunch. Just as we finished and came back into the museum, it started to rain lightly but we decided to just ignore it. Our first stop after lunch was at the general store, a structure from 1840, simply crammed with "goods" of the period--truly everything under the sun! Upstairs were offices for the dentist and the doctor, and there was a humungous collection of medicines and medicinal potions of the time. Outside the door was an apothecary garden.

Then we visited several cottages, including one with stenciling on all the walls (it was the original wall treatment, which had been covered up by layers of wallpaper, but had been revealed when the house was renovated), and another one which was furnished with the collection of furniture acquired by Electra Webb's friend, Mrs. Prentis (the house is now named for her.) Many of these houses, btw, are as interesting in terms of their structure as they are in terms of their contents! Then we visited the Horseshoe Barn. This was the first building Electra Webb built, in order to house the extensive collection of horse-drawn carriages, carts, and sleighs her husband inherited from his parents. Since then the collection has grown and expanded into a second annex building, which includes stage coaches and conestoga wagons. (Look at the cities served by this coach!)
In truth, we never went into that building, because it was already getting late and we were tired. Also, we wanted to see two more special exhibits, one of hooked rugs recently done by an artist named Patty Yoder, and one of quilts. Electra Webb collected quilts under the guidance of Florence Peto, a quilter whose work is truly incredible; the exhibit has both Electra's own collection, and quilts on loan from the Peto family. Both collections are housed in the "Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery", a building ca. 1800. The rest of the building contains Electra's own collection of bandboxes, hat boxes, embroidered samplers, and miniature dioramas. This building was one of my absolute favorites of the entire museum--I fell in love with the bandboxes, and I was absolutely in awe of the quilts and the hooked rugs by Patty Yoder. You can see in these photos the detail in the latter--they are really paintings in wool. The quilts are also very unusual. I can't imagine having the patience to create even one quilt like this; but the rugs so blew me away that they made me want to learn to hook rugs and try to create something like them myself. The thing is, they are truly works of art; I can't even imagine how their creator was able to "see" the picture and create it from yarn. They are just fantastic.

Some of the quilts:

And some of the incredible hooked rugs:


Once again it was 5:00 pm, and we were being politely kicked out of the building--I had to rush through the samplers, and could hardly take time to look at the miniatures. There are probably at least a half-dozen buildings we never got into, including the toy shop, the 1950 house, and the printhouse, so we will have to come back again some day! All in all, we spent 10 hours at the Shelburne Museum, and it wasn't enough. This place is truly a "Don't miss it" attraction if you ever find yourself in the vicinity. Despite occasionally walking through sprinkling rain, we had a really wonderful day!

We came back to the same campground where we spent last night. In the morning before we left, while i was signing up for one more night, the lady in the office told me that, contrary to what I'd been told before, they did have room in this campground over the weekend. I had been worrying that with this the last week before school starts up here, it would be hard to find a weekend campsite. So I looked at the map, and the places we'd still like to visit, and decided that this would be a reasonable place to spend the next two nights as well. It is not gorgeous, but it has several excellent amenities: very reliable wifi, very reliable electricity (we are still dealing with muggy humidity and without AC would be miserable), and a really good bathhouse (very hot showers!). There are also TWO pools (although we haven't gone swimming, but with the heat, it's nice to have the option) and the location is fairly central. So here we are through Saturday night. It is definitely a huge improvement over a Walmart parking lot!

Flowers in Grass and Glass

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

This morning we continued our drive up Route 7, knowing that we didn't have very far to go before Shelburne, our ultimate destination for the day. Sure enough, only about 30 or so minutes into our drive, we arrived at the Vermont Wildflower Farm. A few years ago Joe bought a LOT of wildflower seeds from this company and scattered them all over our front lawn. We both LOVE wildflowers, although that attempt to naturalize our yard didn't work quite as well as we would have liked (probably our neighbors were not thrilled with the "look", in any case!) But we were interested to see the source of all those lovely flowers.

The building was, indeed, surrounded by fields of wildflowers--so pretty! We went inside first, and bought ourselves some more packages of seeds, this time for Joe's office in the side garden (which is VERY shady--we bought a heavy shade mix), and for the area between the sidewalk and street at home (light shade). We are excited to see how well they grow. The shop itself was so fun, just full of seeds everywhere. I am a terrible gardener but I do love the flowers so much.
After we shopped, we walked in the fields for a little bit. There were informational signs everywhere describing the habits of many of the flowers. We enjoyed it a lot.
When we left the Wildflower Farm, we backtracked to a store we'd passed already--Dakin Farm. This is a place with lots of Vermont food items, including their own cheddar cheese--Joe was having a cheese craving! We got lots of "tastes", then bought some cheddar, some salsa, and a couple of other things, including a local farmer's melon. You can't come to Vermont without buying cheddar cheese--and we are still planning to visit Cabot Creamery for THEIR special cheddar as well.

We then headed up the road again and after a discussion of where to go next, arrived at the Shelburne Museum at about 12:30. We ate some lunch and went in at 1:00 p.m. The museum had sounded good on the Internet, especially because there were two special shows this season--one of vintage motorcycles, and one of items created by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Other than these two shows, we had little idea of what to expect of the museum beyond the brief description in our map, that it was contained in 39 buildings and there were more than a dozen gardens. It sounded unusual.

Well, what can I say--Joe and I were both totally enchanted by the Shelburne Museum!! The museum was created by a woman named Electra Havemeyer Webb. She was incredibly wealthy on her own, and she married James Watson Webb, whose mother was a daughter of William Vanderbilt. In other words, together they were fabulously wealthy. Electra inherited the collecting bug from her parents. Her mother, Louisine Havemeyer, was the first to introduce impressionism to the U.S.--she was a good friend of Mary Cassatt, who guided her in purchasing paintings from all the impressionists. (BTW, Louisine was also a suffragette who was arrested for marching in a demonstration to get the vote for women. She went to jail because she refused to pay the $5 fine!) Electra's father collected Japanese screens, paintings, and other items. I found the story of this family so fascinating that I bought a small book about Electra and the Museum when we left, and finished it in one night.

Whereas Louisine's first acquisition was a Degas painting, Electra's first purchase was a wooden cigar store Indian! She had a passion for American folk art, and literally stuffed her several homes (in Vermont and New York) with collections of dolls, pewter, furniture, dolls houses, toys, needlework, farm implements, hatboxes, weathervanes--basically every conceivable category of folk art. Apparently she simply could not let anything get away from her! When her husband inherited a collection of horse-drawn vehicles from his own parents, Electra began the creation of her own museum, building a special barn to house the vehicles and simultaneously filling a nearby building with some of her own collections.

Her final "collection" was actually the buildings which now house the Shelburne Museum! She had so much stuff, she basically had to buy buildings to keep it in, and the buildings she bought were, like her own collections, examples of Americana. The museum buildings include a schoolhouse, meeting house, stagecoach inn, barns, and 18th and 19th century cottages, as well as a general store, a covered bridge, a lighthouse, and even a boat--the 3-story steamship Ticonderoga. The story of the relocation of this boat from Shelburne Harbor two miles away to the grounds of the museum is absolutely fabulous--how my father would have LOVED this story! The boat was floated onto a specially-made railroad car, which was then hauled overland on special tracks. The video and photos of the move are just wonderful.
We spent 4 hours at the museum until it closed, and were very happy to know that our tickets allowed us entry on a second day--we were only about half through the museum. We started out in the round barn (which is the entry point), visiting the special motorcycle exhibit. (BTW, to anyone reading this blog who doesn't realize it: if you click on any of the photos, they will enlarge. The detail you will see in some of these photos when they are enlarged, fx the circus photos, will really amaze you!)From there, we went to the circus building, first riding on the vintage carousel and then enjoying the circus collection, which included a 550-foot long, hand-carved, scale model of a circus parade, as well as circus posters, carousel animals, a hand-carved circus (by a different person than the maker of the parade), and even a video on historic preservation of the wooden carvings.



From there we went to the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building, which is a modern building in a Palladian style. It was built specifically so that the rooms from the Havemeyer family's 5th Avenue, New York home (where Electra grew up) could be transported and recreated on the site of the museum. These rooms contain some of the Impressionist art collected by Louisine, including works by Cassatt, Manet, Monet, Corot, and Degas, as well as some of the Japanese pieces collected by Henry Havemeyer.

We went from there to the Tiffany exhibit--which was simply stunning. Not only were there many examples of lamps and windows, but also furniture, flatware, ceramics, and jewelry. Louisine Havemeyer gave Louis C Tiffany a free hand to design much of her home, and the results were simply outrageous. Right down to her incredible flatware set, no two pieces of which were alike! Many of her own items were part of the exhibit.
Naively thinking that everything afterwards would be an anticlimax, we wandered into the Stagecoach Inn, only to be met by an absolutely charming collection of weathervanes, ship figureheads, cigar-store figures, and other miscellaneous examples of wooden and metal folk art.

The setting for these items in the Stagecoach Inn was absolutely brilliant, and I think this is the point where I totally fell in love with the museum. Also, by this time we were dying of curiosity about Electra herself. It was the docent in this building who gave us some more general information about the buildings, the process by which they'd come to be on the grounds, and Electra's own collections. I should add that there were docents in almost every building, but rather than being there to keep people away from the exhibits, they managed to create an atmosphere of friendliness and happiness. The style of display of most of the objects we saw made them seem very accessible. There were very few barriers to the larger pieces, and the result was an experience of intimacy which was truly special.

We wandered around a little more, visiting the schoolhouse and the original building full of pewter, dolls and dollhouses, and (our particular interest) automata; but by then it was 5:00 and they were kicking us out. We drove only a mile further to a campground right in Shelburne, very convenient, since we were by no means finished with the museum and the other sights of this town.