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A Collection of Americana Collections

© Millard Edward Carr

Everyone who is interested in learning about the past and the lives of everyday people who lived in it owe a debt of gratitude to Electra Havemeyer Webb. Shelburne Museum is, as its founder, Mrs. Webb, once called it, "a collection of collections." She was a wealthy woman who married into wealth and used her influence and her money to buy vast amounts of vanishing Americana - from buildings to individual personal items of everyday use - to preserve it for future generations. She could easily be called the mother of Americana preservation.

While she had the taste and the resources to collect fine art and antiques, it was Mrs. Webb's unique insight to see beauty in everyday, utilitarian items that makes the collection so memorable. Whether it was decoys or dentists' trade signs, quilts, tools, toys, or cradles, Mrs. Webb realized that the hand-made items of the young American nation needed to be preserved and saw to it that they were. There are over 150,000 items of everyday American life that help us better understand the beginnings and growth of the New World from the perspective of the people who lived it. During a visit to Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, you'll be able to see some 37 unique buildings -- many of them museum pieces themselves -- that house an eclectic array of American folk treasures. In the Tuckaway General Store, for example, you'll find everything the 18th and 19th Century person needed, from seeds and thread to horse collars and hats. At the Vermont House, you'll be able to see the vast collections from around the world that a retired sea captain of the 19th Century might have in his home.

If it's horse-drawn vehicles you're interested in, you'll find an interesting collection of them in the Horseshoe Barn Annex. In all of these buildings you'll find an incredible collection of Americana including priceless vintage quilts, toys, decoys, weather vanes, trade signs, as well as works of art by Andrew Wyeth, Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, Degas -- and Grandma Moses which Mrs. Webb also collected.

The 25 original structures of the museum cover four centuries of America and include a round barn, a covered bridge, a real lighthouse, and an authentic steamboat, the Ticonderoga. Some, like the covered bridge, have been carefully dismantled and reassembled piece-by-piece. In other cases, as with the silo in the round barn, some of the buildings were moved here intact. The upper segment of the silo, a mere 9,000 pounds, was delivered by helicopter. There's so much to see at Shelburne Museum, that there's a jitney bus that can take you from one building to another.

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