Shelburne Museum

Shelburne Museum, in Shelburne, Vermont, spreads over 45 acres near Lake Champlain. More than 150,000 works are shown in 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of them historic structures moved here from other places in New England and New York. The result feels like a village of old New England architecture, with over 400 lilacs, a circular formal garden and herb, vegetable and perennial gardens.

Among the buildings are houses, barns, a meeting house, an 1840 one-room schoolhouse, an 1840 general store, an 1890 Vermont slate jail, a 19th-century covered bridge with two lanes and a footpath, a rare 18th-century up-and-down sawmill, an 1890 railroad station, a 1914 steam locomotive and the 1871 Colchester Reef Light, a lighthouse. One of the historic barns is a 1901 Vermont round barn.

The 1906 steamboat Ticonderoga, 220 feet long, is also part of the museum and is a National Historic Landmark.

Electra Havemeyer Webb founded the museum in 1947. She was one of the first people to treat the everyday and decorative arts of rural America as worth collecting, and she moved the old buildings to Shelburne so the objects would have fitting homes.

The collections include 1,400 wildfowl decoys and miniature carvings, 120 weathervanes, 50 carousel figures, among them all 40 animals of an early Dentzel carousel, 770 bed coverings including 500 quilts, 225 horse-drawn vehicles and a circus collection with a hand-carved miniature circus of 3,500 pieces. Craftspeople run working exhibits of blacksmithing, printing, spinning and weaving.

There are also American paintings by artists such as Homer, Cassatt and Wyeth. Impressionist works by Monet, Degas and Manet from the Havemeyer family collection hang in rooms recreated from the Webbs’ New York apartment of around 1930, and they are the only Impressionist paintings on public view in Vermont.