How did the steamboat Ticonderoga get to the Shelburne Museum?
Photographs: John Phelan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · NRavenel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jim Griffin, Wikimedia Commons, CC0
The Journal · Shelburne Museum
The story behind Shelburne Museum's steamboat, plus the historic buildings, farms, and collections around it.
Why it matters
Shelburne Museum is a museum of art, design, and Americana in Shelburne, near the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain. More than 150,000 works are shown across 39 exhibition buildings on 45 acres, 25 of them historic structures relocated to the grounds, so the site reads less like a gallery and more like an assembled village.
Houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a jail, a general store, a covered bridge, and a steamboat stand among lilacs and gardens, each building holding part of the collection it was chosen to display. The effect is deliberate: Electra Havemeyer Webb wanted objects shown in settings close to where they originated.
Nearby, Shelburne Farms shows the other side of the same regional history, a Gilded Age estate planned as a working farm. The city of Burlington lies a short drive north, making the two sites and the lake shore easy to combine into a single visit to this part of Vermont.
Electra Havemeyer Webb
The museum was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, a pioneering collector of American folk art. She was the daughter of Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Louisine Elder Havemeyer, important collectors of Impressionism and of European and Asian art, but she developed her own eye for objects that expressed a distinctly American aesthetic.
She was among the first collectors to treat the decorative and applied arts of rural America as worth preserving. To display what she gathered, she collected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings from New England and New York and relocated about twenty historic structures to Shelburne, calling the result an educational project, varied and alive.
Webb died in 1960, and the museum has since leaned toward folk art and contemporary work related to its collection. She exchanged ideas with other major collectors, among them Katherine Prentis Murphy and Henry Francis du Pont, founder of the Winterthur Museum, who credited her with inspiring his own collecting; during the First World War she had driven an ambulance, and in the second she directed a civil defense center and its blood bank.
How the Ticonderoga got to Shelburne
The steamboat Ticonderoga is the single largest object in the collection and the one most visitors remember. Built in 1906 and measuring 220 feet, it is a National Historic Landmark, moved long ago from open water to a landscaped site at the museum, far from any lake it once sailed.
Bringing a vessel of that length from the waters of Lake Champlain onto museum grounds is, by any measure, an unusual feat of engineering, and the museum treats the story of how it was done as part of the exhibit itself, not as a minor footnote to the ship's long history.
The practical details, the route taken, the equipment used, and how long the operation lasted, are best learned on site from the exhibit's own signage and from museum staff, since this overview cannot substitute for the museum's own account; visitors can check with the museum in advance or ask when they arrive, near the other transportation exhibits, including an 1890 railroad station, a 1914 steam locomotive, and an 1890 private rail car.
The buildings
The grounds include the 1871 Colchester Reef Light, three historic and three replica barns, among them a Vermont round barn built in 1901, a working carousel, and blacksmith and wheelwright shops. A late nineteenth-century printing shop stands among them, each building moved or reconstructed to hold part of the collection.
Other structures include an 1840 one-room schoolhouse, an 1890 Vermont slate jail, an 1840 general store, a rare eighteenth-century up-and-down sawmill, and a covered bridge built with two lanes and a footpath. A reconstructed office of the Vermont physician D. C. Jarvis stands nearby, preserving a piece of the state's rural medical history.
Transportation history has its own corner, with an 1890 railroad station, a 1914 steam locomotive, and an 1890 private rail car standing near the steamboat; craftspeople staff working exhibits of blacksmithing, printing, spinning, and weaving throughout the grounds, and the landscape includes more than four hundred lilacs, a circular formal garden, and herb, heirloom vegetable, and perennial gardens linking the buildings across forty-five acres.
The collections
The folk art collection includes 1,400 wildfowl decoys and miniature carvings, 150 trade figures and signs, 120 weathervanes, and fifty carousel figures, among them all forty animals of an early Dentzel carousel, a collection large enough to fill several of the museum's smaller exhibition buildings on its own, arranged by type rather than by era.
Textile holdings run to 770 bed coverings, five hundred of them quilts, four hundred hooked and sewn rugs, and 2,800 costumes and accessories. The decorative arts collection totals 6,650 pieces, including one of the country's best regional collections of painted furniture, much of it made in Vermont and neighboring states.
Working life appears in 225 horse-drawn vehicles, 1,000 farm implements, and 5,000 hand tools, alongside paintings by Bierstadt, Cassatt, Homer, Grandma Moses, and Andrew Wyeth. A group of Havemeyer family Impressionist pictures, by Corot, Degas, Manet, and Monet, hangs in rooms re-created from the Webbs' 1930s New York apartment, the only such paintings on public view in Vermont; the circus collection adds Barnum memorabilia, a hand-carved miniature circus, and, since 2013, the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education.
Shelburne Farms
Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit education center for sustainability, a 1,400-acre working farm, and a National Historic Landmark on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain. It was created in 1886 by Dr. William Seward Webb and Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb as a model agricultural estate, funded by her family's railroad fortune.
The Webbs commissioned the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out 3,800 acres of farm, field, and forest, and the New York architect Robert Henderson Robertson to design the buildings. The estate was assembled by buying many mostly agricultural properties and adapting existing roads and lanes, some of them public ways the Webbs petitioned to have closed.
The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2001; descendants of the Webbs incorporated it as a nonprofit educational organization in 1972. Nearly four hundred acres of its woodland were certified by the Forest Stewardship Council in 1998, and its grass-based dairy keeps a herd of 125 purebred Brown Swiss cows, whose milk becomes farmhouse cheddar.
Planning a visit
Allow a full day for the museum, since its buildings are spread across the full forty-five acres, and a half day for the farm. Comfortable footwear matters more than usual, given the distance between the outer exhibition buildings and the number of structures worth stopping at along the way through the grounds.
The lake shore at Shelburne is described on the Lake Champlain page, and the city of Burlington lies a short drive north, so a single trip can combine the museum, the farm, and the shoreline without much extra driving, since all three sit close together on the same stretch of the lake.
Both the museum and the farm keep seasonal arrangements for opening days, tours, and events, so visitors should check each site's own information before traveling rather than assume either keeps the same schedule as on a previous visit. This matters especially for anyone planning a trip around a specific exhibit or the circus parade.
