Pub In The Park

A few miles south of Burlington where you’ll find some of the best Vermont resorts , and just past Shelburne Bay, you’ll discover a massive museum of art and Americana, with over 150,000 works of art displayed in 39 exhibitions buildings, 25 structures of which are historic and have been relocated specifically to be a part of the museum grounds.

Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888 to 1960) was a pioneer of American folk art collections, and she founded the museum in 1947, about 63 years ago. In addition to impressionist paintings, folk art, quilts, and carriages from the 19th Century, as well as artifacts from the 17th to 20th century, she also collected whole buildings from the 18th and 19th century from New England and New York, relocating twenty of them to Shelburne.

You’ll find then, in the Shelburne Museum houses and barns and meeting homes, a one room-schoolhouse, a light house, a jail, a general store, a covered bridge, not to mention a 220 foot steamboat christened, “Ticonderoga.”

The idea behind this unique museum was to collect pieces and exhibit them in a village-like setting that reflected historic New England architecture; this is all enhanced by a landscape containing 400 lilacs, a circular formal garden, herb and heirloom vegetable gardens, as well as perennial gardens.

A trip to the Shelburne Museum, then, allows you to obtain a perspective on four centuries of art and culture. Among the folk art, you’ll discover 1,500 wildfowl decoys and miniatures, 150 trade figures and signs, 120 weather-vanes, and 50 carousel figures. A circus collection includes 600 historic posters and letters and memorabilia from such notables as P.T. Barnum, as well as a hand-carved 4,000 piece Kirk Brothers Miniature Circus. Exhibits on textiles includes 770 bed coverings, and 500 quilts, 400 hooked and sewn rugs, and over 2,800 costumes and accessories. There’s a decorative arts collection, too, with 6,650 pieces, such as glass, ceramics, pewter, scrimshaw, metalwork, and one of the nation’s best regional collections of painted furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Among the art work, there are over 3,200 American prints, drawings, graphics, and paintings, representing works from Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Degas, Manet, Bierstadt, Church, Daubigny, Field, Heade, and Hicks, and others.

Until October 24th, you may see a special exhibit of modern and contemporary photography, titled “Constructed Landscapes,” featuring 60 photographs of Ansel Adams (1902 to 1984) and Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955), bringing together one of the most influential landscape photographers who ever lived with a contemporary photographer of “manufactured landscapes,” such as mines, railways cuts, and dams.

Beyond the exhibits, there are an amazing amount of buildings to explore, among them the 1950s House, apothecary shop, the blacksmith shop, the circus building, the Dorset House, the Dutton House, the General Store, the Hat and Fragrance Textile Gallery, Castleton Jail, the Horseshoe Barn and Annex, and the Colchester Reef Lighthouse.

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