Shelburne Museum: Treasure in Our Midst
By
Elizabeth Bassett

In the mood for Monet or Degas? How about Grandma Moses, Mary
Cassatt, or Georgia O'Keefe? How long has it been since you glided up
and down on a carousel or paced the decks of a paddlewheel steamboat?
A mere mile from the edge of Charlotte, scattered over 45 hilly acres,
the Shelburne Museum unfolds its treasure.
For little more than the price of a first-run movie, the magic is
yours. Thanks to a gift from local philanthropist Lois McClure,
Vermont visitors pay only half price, $9.00 for an adult ticket to the
Shelburne Museum, good for two consecutive days.
"The museum is a treasure in our midst and I want local people to
have the opportunity to visit," says Lois McClure. "My husband was on
the board and he knew that, despite the expensive admission, the
museum is not making money on visitors. So I asked myself how I could
make it better. This was my answer." McClure intends to continue this
gift to Vermonters. "I want to do this for as long as I live," she says.
About two decades ago a helicopter lowered the cylindrical heart of
the Round Barn to its new home at the museum. Today visitors begin
their visit in this airy space where a special exhibit of weathervanes
lines the walls. You can't help but smile at pigs, boars, roosters,
cows peppered with bullet holes, Indians with drawn bows, locomotives,
and a pouter pigeon with an enormously inflated crop. Downstairs, an
eight-minute video introduces the museum and its founder Electra
Havemeyer Webb. In 1907, at the age of 18, Webb defied her mother's
sophisticated taste and purchased her first piece of folk art, a cigar
store Indian. Electra's wide-ranging taste and enormous appetite for
Americana await unfold at the Shelburne Museum, her gift to us.
A quick, but by no means inclusive tour might include:
1950s House- Baby boomers will recognize the bulging white Kelvinator
"ice box," as my grandmother called it, and the rounded corners of the
Hotpoint stove. Painted wooden bureaus and clothes hampers could have
come from my bedroom. Pink tiles and fixtures fill the lone bathroom
of this three-bedroom house, a blast from the past.
For a taste of a more rarified twentieth century life, the Electra
Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building exhibits rooms from the founder's New
York City apartment. Four large canvases by Claude Monet grace the
dining room walls, including one of his haystacks and London's Charing
Cross Bridge in the fog. The living room boasts several Manets, yet
another Monet, and Rembrandt. You may wish you were spending a few
nights in the Green Guest Room, sleeping beneath three works by Mary
Cassatt and three canvases of Edgar Degas' dancers.
Recently restored to its original splendor, the Lake Champlain
paddlewheel steamboat Ticonderoga, or the "Ti," is a National Historic
Landmark. Imagine yourself sipping consume from a silver spoon in the
dining room, watching the coastlines of Vermont and New York from your
wicker rocker, or rocking to sleep in a cozy stateroom.
Three floors of photos, maps, cannon balls, and dinnerware bring to
life nineteenth century days in a Lighthouse on Colchester Reef.
Ashore, Vermont property owners worked out their taxes by helping to
maintain roads. In winter they rode atop wooden snow rollers nearly
six feet in diameter, like the one in the Dutton House Shed. Travel
by road was actually easier on packed snow than on rutted and muddy
dirt roads in other seasons. A team of six horses pulls a snow roller
past the Pavilion Building in Montpelier in an 1875 photo.
Huge blossoms of red, orange, and yellow, bordered by deep purple
petunias, beckon visitors to the museum's headline exhibit, Simple
Beauty: Paintings by Georgia O'Keefe. The newly planted garden at the
Webb Gallery mimics O'Keefe's lavish, oversized blooms. O'Keefe
painted her giant flowers because she felt no one would pay attention
to small paintings of an unknown artist. Drawn largely from private
collections the canvases include the 1939 Hibiscus with Plumereia,
1927 Purple Petunia, and an extravagantly veined white datura. From
across the gallery O'Keefe's 1931 New Mexico Mountain resembles her
large flowers, rusty rose hillsides bleeding to beige in voluptuous
folds.
The flowerbed in front of the Vermont House Gallery sets a different
mood. Tiny zinnias, California golden poppies, nasturtium tendrils,
and pale lavender petunias presage the artistry of Tasha Tudor in
another of the season's special exhibits, East of Vermont, West of New
Hampshire (think about this a moment). Tudor's diminutive drawings are
familiar to readers of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden or
A Little Princess. Tudor also wrote and illustrated The Corgiville
Fair, where clutches of corgis pose for photographers, kittens in
strollers pay to watch Professor Scratchard's trained fleas, and goats
stroll arm-in-arm.
Kids (or adults?) with a short attention span? Lock the miscreants in
jail. In 1953 the museum purchased a two-cell slate jail from the town
of Castleton for the sum of $50, one dollar per ton. With its roof and
gable ends removed, the mini-prison rode at the stately pace of 3 to 7
miles per hour for the three-day, 64-mile journey to Shelburne.
Mounted on special dollies with four sets of brakes, the jail passed
beneath the Rutland Railroad in Vergennes with only five inches of
clearance.
Parents can sit a spell in Alyssia's Garden while children swing or
roll wooden hoops. A picket fence and lush perennials border the
grassy nineteenth century playground.
The Textile Gallery, Toy Shop, and Variety Unit are jammed with
period toys, glassware, hats, clothing, and more. Another special
exhibit: Art and Illusion: Kaleidoscope Quilts, joins the museums
renowned collection.
At the Blacksmith Shop as craftsmen hammer, twist, and cut tools and
decorative pieces while you watch. Their coat hooks are for sale in
the Museum Store.
Imagine an overnight journey in the private rail car Grand Isle:
dinner on velvet banquettes, bath in a diminutive tub, and sweet
dreams between crisp sheets. Amtrak it ain't!
Children at heart can ride endlessly (no tickets required) on the
1920s Carousel. Music plays as the painted ponies go up and down.
The Beach Lodge, a log cabin with an enormous double fieldstone
fireplace, brims with hunting trophies: towering bears and dozens
mounted heads of moose, deer, elk, exotic sheep, and more. Next door,
in the Beach Gallery, Native American clothing and artifacts join
paintings of the outdoors. In a corner of the gallery two sets of
caribou horns interlock, the result of a death struggle. A painting of
the imagined battle hangs over the intricate tangle of bone.
Horse-drawn and hand-pumped fire wagons, eighteenth-century wall
stenciling, Grandma Moses and Currier and Ives originals, glass canes,
sleighs, wagons, decoys, a sawmill, thousands of hand-carved circus
figures, and nineteenth century medical and dental instruments- ouch!
The list goes on.
Bring proof of Vermont residency- driver's license or high school
photo-id. to qualify for the $9 admission or, better yet, become a
member (tax-deductible) and visit often. Even if you've visited dozens
of times you will always find something new that is old.

Preview the museum collection and special exhibits at
www.shelburnemuseum.org. General information at 985-3346. The museum
is open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through October 31.